Page Titles and SEO

A recent internal discussion is prompting this posting.  In my opinion (thats all SEO really is, really), the page title weighs heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines.  So to help you in your efforts, here's what to look for:

1. Include an accurate, keyword-rich page title of about 7 words
2. Exclude transition words (and, the, a etc.) in the title – they just waste space
3. Include a unique title for each page

Note that the title is the first and probably the only thing the searcher will look at in the search results, but having a keyword list as title might get you listed higher (if you're not penalized), but it's less likely to get clicked than a well structured title.

Consider this syntax:

In the HEAD section of the site add:

<title>Your Keyword-Rich, Descriptive Page Title Here</title>

Hope you find this useful.  Speak with you soon.  DC

Do You Understand Link Building, Keywords & Anchor Text?

We know the power (and importance) of link building. So while I was reading a few good SEO posts at seomoz, it reminded me that I promised a link building post of my own. Simply put, to build effective SEO, it’s important to be consistent when working on internal links, anchor text, and keywords. Perhaps an illustration will help convey my point.

Suppose you own a company that sells toys (with "toys" being the most generic word for the company’s products) and the company’s website is toysabc.com. Pick four keywords (KW) to drive your anchor text efforts.

The illustration below presents a suggested link structure, rich with anchor-text-laden keywords, that should help drive higher page rank scores and improve average times on your toysabc.com site.

Obviously, your architecture needs to support subpage folders and your Marketing Team still needs to complete the fundamental work in your keyword research efforts.

I hope this helps. Speak with you soon. DC

What's your page rank?

So you've completed your title tag changes (the most important ones, by the way). Did you remember to resubmit your site to the search engines? It may take a few days/weeks/months to see any gains, but dont fret - we changed our tags and improved PR from 5 to 6 in less than 30 days. Knowing that PR is based on a log scale, well, you can see how happy we are. See a comparative graphic and compare your site's PR to other well-known, high traffic sites. And consider what it will take SEO-wise to improve your score to your desired goal. Good luck.

Speak with you soon. DC

5 SEO Tips - you have your robots.txt so now what?

Now that the spiders can crawl your site (see my most recent post on creating a robots.txt file), where should you focus your SEO energy to get the most impact? My five suggested areas are:

• Title tags and urls
• Other tags and headings
• Keywords and content
• Site map
• Site registration

I will try to blog individually about each area in my next several posts, but for now, if you can focus on these five areas, you may reduce your dependency on your SEO consultant and actually improve your page ranks in a fairly short period of time! And remember, Google owns all this stuff so if anyone tells you they truly know how to crack the SEO code, use caution...unless their names are either Larry or Sergey.

Speak with you soon. DC

Your SEO Library Card - robots.txt

As I’m working on resetting a new site to be compliant with the latest SEO strategies, I’m reminded of an analogy I’ve used to describe the importance of the robots.txt file. In the world of Googlebot and other bots/spiders, who are like patrons visiting a library full of information contained in books on shelves, they can’t enter your domain effectively without the robots.txt file – much like a patron can’t effectively enter a library without a library card. Sure, patrons can enter the building, they can read, but they cant check out anything. But they may go to the wrong shelves a few times. And its difficult to use the information more than one time.

How to improve the performance of your site? Create a regular text file called robots.txt. This file must be uploaded to the root accessible directory of your site, not a subdirectory (ie: http://www.domain.com/ but NOT http://www.domain.com/folder/) -- anything else and its just another text file.

Next? Unless you are a webmaster, I’d suggest you call yours :). They can help you format the file and actually write valuable commands for the search engines (formally known as the "Robots Exclusion Protocol"). The format is simple enough for most intents and purposes: a USERAGENT line to identify the crawler in question followed by one or more DISALLOW: lines to disallow it from crawling certain parts of your site. But again, because it’s so simple, it’s just as easy to screw things up.

When finished your file can be as simple as this, which allows all spiders to
index everything:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Or this,
which prevents all spiders from indexing any part of your
site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

A single keystroke separates the files, but it also determines who will have the higher page rank, and ultimately determine the traffic flow.

Good luck and may the spiders infest your site! Speak with you soon. DC