Target 2 or 3 Key Word "Search Terms" in your Title Tags!
Spent Hundreds of £'s/$'s spent on a websites beautiful design? "I HAVE SEEN IT TIME AND AGAIN!" Wonderful looking web sites where the owners have spent hundreds sometimes thousands of Pounds/Dollars on a website! Only for that site to have the most basic and fundamental principles left out and that website rendered virtually useless re the search engines without spending even more money for someone to optimise said website.
The first and easiest way to spot this is to see a web site with "No Search Terms" in it's "Title Tags" and just the URL or name of the business/company. This combined with an "Over Designed" website with to much flash pictures/images and slow downloading pages can mean death to the most beautiful looking websites "design wise" as far as SEO goes.
I have "Spent lots of Money" on my website design only to appear nowhere useful on Google! If that sounds like you then you are not alone! Sometimes it's sort of your own fault to. A web design service usually works to your "Brief" and more often than not they are not about to tell you or give you anything for free if they can help it or have the chance to make some extra money from you.
After all Web Design and SEO are 2 separate skills really. They can and should be done together but this is not always done in practice (For example I can achieve some mean SE results but couldn't design a flash website without out sourcing the work to someone with those design skills) where as I could knock up a basic site using CSS & Xhtml like KD-Mains.com or Seymour & Castle UK.
Unless you are spending thousands on a website to employ a Team which will include a Web Designer a back end coder a SEO expert and a SEO content writer then you are only going to get a small part of the overall service actually need to achieve the ultimate results for your website. With a little research though you can provide a more search engine friendly brief to your web design team.
Your web sites "Title Tags" are the most important place to have your main search terms! I am not joking when I say "that what appears in your "Title Tags" can make a World of difference" when it comes to how your web site is found and ranked!" I will use two of my own web pages that appears on page 1 or 2 of Google for well over 20 different organic/natural search terms as an example.
http://www.tted.co.uk/commission-a-cartoonist.htm and http://www.tted.co.uk/hire-a-writer.htm. "Google" Search any of the following "Search Terms"
Hire writer - Hire SEO writer - Hire cartoonist - Hire copyist - Hire a copyist - Hire copy writer - Hire illustrator - Commission writer - Commission caricaturist - Commission a caricaturist - Commission illustrator - Commission cartoonist - Commission SEO writer - Hire cartoonist illustrator - commission cartoonist illustrator - Commission a cartoonist - Hire artist - Hire an artist - Cartoonist illustrator - Commission a writer and You will find those 2 pages above on Page 1 or 2 of Google! (Occasionally page 3!)
WOW What amazing Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)!
Search Engine results like those are achieved by careful research of the Search Engines and what it is they need to index your page and by working from the beginning of SEO "The Title Tags", right click on those 2 Tted.co.uk pages above and "View source" to see how I have targeted the words "Hire" and "Commission" with Writing or SEO writers and other artists search terms for the "Hire a Writer" page and for cartoonists illustrators and artists for the "Commission a cartoonist" page. Do you see how I have combined the words in the "Title Tags"?
You can see I have included all the search terms that I want those pages to be found for. So include in your Title Tags "Search Terms" with "Text Content" that is relevant and continued on your corresponding page is the first port of call you should be planning your web sites strategy around.
Let's now use a fictitious example to reinforce what you should learnt so far. Let's assume you have a website called www.apple-orange.co.uk. The first thing we notice about our Apple-Orange.co.uk URL is that it is already very well chosen for the job in hand in some ways. In that I mean we already have good search term words in the name.
So where do we go from here regarding the "Title Tags" for our www.apple-orange.co.uk URL?
"Apple iPhone iMac iTune iPod Orange Telecom Mobile Broadband apple-orange.co.uk"
Would be where I would start - but this is only as I don't have all the info I would need! I would want to know what the plans and text content of the corresponding page would be to truly target things properly. All the above should give you a good idea how to use your "Title Tags" and where to start from when it comes to planning the Search Engine Optimisation for your web site! Continue to SEO Tutorial ( Part 2)
My Top 3 other SEO Tutorials
W3Schools
HyperGurl
WebCredibles
Remember: Nothing in SEO is truly"Set in Stone"! Each Page differs and what works for one may not work for another, context is the key.
