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Title Tag Best Practices

Doug Williams @ 5:06 am

This blog entry was posted on September 30, 2011.

The Title Tag describes a webpage for both search engines and for visitors. It is the single most important SEO element for page level SEO (on-page factors). Many times simply fixing Title Tags alone will improve search engine rankings for a website.

It not only appears visibly at the top of your browser, it appears in the HTML code of your website and as the main headline in the search engine results page (SERP).

A well crafted title tag will help get a top ranking and catch the attention of a searcher to begin the conversion process by inviting them to your web page. It should be an accurate, concise description of the content on the web page.

Title Tag format: Keyword 1, Keyword 2 | Company (or brand) name

Your Title Tag should be unique (not duplicated on other pages). It should contain the central topic of the web page. Words placed at the beginning of the Title Tag are given more importance than the words at the end. This is why the most important keyword phrase for a web page should be at the beginning. The company name is typically placed at the end.

An alternate approach: If you company brand is strong and people will search for you by your brand, then place the company name or brand name first and follow it with the keyword phrases.

Title Tag length: Less than 65-70 characters

This is because 70 characters is the maximum length Google will display on the SERP. Title tags can be longer, the search engines will just cut off the Title Tag and indicate that it was cut off with an ellipsis… Remember that the words placed at the beginning are given more weight by the search engines so longer tags don’t make sense. 65-70 characters usually gives you room for two keyword phrases and the company name.

Local: If yours is a local business seeking local customers, then include city and or state. Typically people will search using the company name + location or company type + location.

Compelling: Your Title Tag will appear in the search results. Make it compelling so it will pull in more visits from the search results.

Unique: Each page should have a unique Title Tag. Duplicate titles will harm search rankings.

Repeat Keywords: For the best SEO impact the keywords in the Title Tag should be used in the page headlines (H1 tag and H2 tags). Use the keywords in the first paragraph of the body text and in a hyperlink to a relevant web page.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



7 Tools You Can Use to Quality Check Your Website

Doug Williams @ 12:10 pm

This blog entry was posted on September 26, 2011.

These are some of my favorite online tools for evaluating and testing websites. Use these to improve your current site or to evaluate a website your designer just completed.

  1. W3C Code Validator: This is the standard code validator put out by the World Wide Web Consortium. Pages should be error free for maximum browser compatibility. Pages don’t have to be completely error free to work and even to get great rankings. My general guideline is that any page should have 25 or fewer errors.
  2. Broken Link Checkers: Scan your site to find both internal and external broken links. Two great ones to download are Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog SEO Spider . W3C has their own online broken link checker.
  3. Spell Checker: There is nothing that spoils your professional image as fast as misspellings on your website. There are a number of spell checkers that you can use. W3C Spell Checker  will check one page URL at a time. Other services such as Spellchecker.net will spider your site and email you a report.
  4. Browser Check: Does your website render well on all the popular browsers? Browsershots.org allows you to generate a screenshot of how your site will look in over 80 browsers and browser versions. If you want to identify what the current market share is of each browser version, go to W3schools.com
  5. Mobile Emulators: There are several mobile emulators that will show how your website will render on the small screen. Opera Mini Simulator, dotMobi Emulator, iPad Emulator and the iPad Emulator
  6. Page Load Speed:  This page load speed checker tool downloads a complete web page including all objects. It shows the size of each object (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes)., load time by object and then displays the load sequence graphically. It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.
  7. SEO Website Analysis Tool:  Woorank has this free and surprisingly thorough service checks dozens of important website factors that influence SEO and displays them in a single page. This by itself can be used as a website audit report.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



Beyond Link Building: 5 Important Off-Page SEO Factors

Doug Williams @ 4:30 am

This blog entry was posted on September 23, 2011.

Together on-page and off-page factors make up the SEO process to get top rankings. You need to be doing both to get the best rankings results. Other than link building, what are the other off-page SEO factors?

  1. Site age: Older and long established websites show stability. New pages are indexed quickly. New websites go through a penalty phase (Google Sandbox) where it is difficult to get ranked for difficult phrases. The Sandbox penalty can last 18 months for highly competitive phrases.
  2. Domain renewal term: Renew (or purchase) your domain for the longest period possible. Choose 10 years if your registrar will let you. Google will “trust” your domain more the longer you renew it for. 1-year domains are often “throw-away” domains.
  3. Domain trust and authority: Domain trust is a measure of who links to you… and who you link to. A trusted highly trusted site such as Wikipedia or .edu sites will tend to link to other trusted sites. Spammers tend to link to spammers. Domain authority is a measure of a site’s link power. Are they linked to by other high PageRank sites? Is there a diverse base of domains that link to them?
  4. Usage data signals: Google has patented a number of factors that are related to user behavior. They may begin using information on how content is capturing and holding your audience’s attention. This includes number of visitors, page selection (click-thru-rate), which pages are visited, how much time is spent on a page and if a page has been bookmarked.
  5. Google +1: Google has confirmed that the number of +1 votes will influence the position of a website in the search results. This is a newer ranking signal that we will have to see how it stands the test of time.

Contact us for a quote on our link building service.

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Filed under: Link Popularity



What are the Important Link Building Factors?

Doug Williams @ 9:02 pm

This blog entry was posted on September 20, 2011.

Getting other websites to link to your site is a large part of SEO. Links should be from relevant websites, blogs, directories and social media. Ideally the hyperlink text (anchor text) will include your keyword phrases.

  1. Total volume of inbound links – The total number of incoming links increase the importance and trustworthiness of a page.
  2. Link quality – Links coming from higher PR pages or from authority sites are considered more important.
  3. Anchor text – Very valuable if the hyperlinked text contains keywords.
  4. Content relevance (referring page) – More valuable if the page content, page title and especially the adjacent words are relevant to your page.
  5. Page Location (referring page) – Where is your link located on the referring page? Footer links carry less value than links in the content area. Higher up on the referring page is better.
  6. Link acquisition rate- A consistent rate of accruing links over a long time is better and more natural.
  7. Deep link ratio: Deep links to specific pages inside your website are more natural than having all links pointing to your home page.
  8. Age of link – Older links are more valued than new ones that are recently acquired.
  9. Number of outgoing links (referring page) – It is better for the referring page to have fewer outbound links on it.
  10. Image and JavaScript links have little to no value.
  11. Links from .edu – Only qualified educational organizations are allowed to purchase .edu domains. These are less subject to manipulation and therefore more valued.
  12. Link geography: Australia based links are better if you have an Australia based website and you are optimizing for the Australia market.
  13. Diversity: Links from many types of sites are better. Develop a portfolio of links from blogs, directories, social bookmarks, etc.
  14. Paid Links: This is a negative factor. Google has methods of detecting paid links and links in close association to known paid links. Once detected the link is devalued at once.

Contact us for a site audit and quote on our link building service.

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Filed under: Link Popularity



The Psychology of Search

Doug Williams @ 5:47 am

This blog entry was posted on September 16, 2011.

Marketers need to understand the motivation and psychology behind why people do what they do. When people search on a search engine, what are they searching for? Generally speaking, people search with a definite purpose. They have a question to be answered, information to research or something to buy.

Search engines are a tool for people to access information. They are much faster than the old card catalog at the public library and give access to almost unlimited subjects. News and stories are reported by anyone with a computer or even with phones uploading videos to YouTube.

What are people searching for? It is whatever is impacting their life at that moment. It could be a plumber to replace the hot water heater, the menu at the local restaurant or how to set-up their new WordPress blog.

As an SEO services company, we look at usage patterns of how people search for specific products or services. We look at past searches to predict how people will search in the future. Let’s look at how people may look for a plumber. We start by looking at all plumbing related searches. For this analysis we used exact match data.

  1. Fixtures: 54.3% of searches were for fixtures ( kitchen sinks, faucets, bathroom fixtures)
  2. Plumber: 19.1% of searches were for a plumber (plumber, plumbing contractor)
  3. Parts: 16.3% were for parts (plumbing supplies, plumbing parts)
  4. Problem: 10.3% of searches were for an urgent problem (broken pipe, toilet repair)

Phrases related to fixtures and parts would be more suited to a plumbing products store that sales to do-it-yourselfers and plumbers. People search for a plumber using the word plumber (usually along with a city name). They also search frequently based on the nature of the problem. This would mean a plumber’s website should not only be optimized for “plumber + city” but also for the types of problems he solves or installations he does.

Need help with keyword selection? Try our keyword research services to get you own SEO project started .

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



SEO Tactics: Pick High Performance Keywords

Doug Williams @ 6:56 am

This blog entry was posted on September 13, 2011.

The first step in SEO is selecting your keyword phrases. Not just any keywords, you need high performance keywords. High performance keyword phrases attract droves of buyers. Sounds easy? You need to select keywords based on four factors: relevance, buyer strength, search volume and competition.

Start by using a keyword research tool like Market Samurai that allows you to generate hundreds of candidate phrases along with search volume and number of competing web pages. Then you will select hour high performance phrases based on these four factors.

  1. Relevance: You want your website to have maximum appeal to your market. Select phrases that are highly relevant your business. If someone typed in your targeted phrase, will they want to buy what you are selling? Don’t start by selecting phrases with the highest search volume.
  2. Buyer Strength: These are phrases that are more specific and show intent to take action. These are different than information seeking phrases. Buyer phrases have more words, are more specific such as make and model and will frequently include city or other local terms.
  3. Volume: Phrases with a higher volume of searches will have more potential to create traffic for your website. Don’t be fooled into picking high volume phrases that are not relevant. Creating a network of low volume phrases that are highly relevant can create more traffic that is more likely to convert.
  4. Competition: This is much more than the number of competing pages for a given phrase. This is the strength of the competitors that have a page one ranking already. Look at factors such as domain age, number of backlinks and number of indexed pages.

Selecting high performance keywords is a balance of these four factors. Need help with choosing the best keywords? Try our keyword research services.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



Broken Link Checkers That I Use

Doug Williams @ 5:12 am

This blog entry was posted on September 9, 2011.

I recently revamped my website and moved my blog from a separate Domain and combined it with my website. A standard step in any SEO process would be to check and repair broken links.I used my normal broken link checkers Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Both are free, but the Screaming Frog Tool has a paid version for larger websites.

What I quickly discovered was that my blog with 4-1/2 years of postings 2-4 times per week had many hundreds of broken links. Both from websites that had disappeared and from comment links where the websites no longer existed. It was obvious that years of neglect were going to take time to fix.

Both Xenu and the Screaming Frog spider did a great job at detecting problems and identifying what needed to be fixed. It still required going in and manually inspecting and then removing each link one at a time.

I wondered if there would be a broken link checker that would work as a plugin for my WordPress blog? With a quick Google search I located a WP Broken Link Checker plugin that monitors your blog and then reports all broken links. Even more important, it allowed for easy editing from the plugin page.

I installed the plugin and allowed it to work overnight. The next morning showed 500 broken links with over 90% of them coming from comments. It took me about an hour to go through all the problem links and remove the broken links.

I went through and scanned my entire site with Xenu Link Sleuth and this confirmed that all the broken links had been removed. I had discovered another tool to add to my arsenal. All 3 of these tools are great and I highly recommend all 3.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



Why I Moved My Blog To Become Part Of My Website

Doug Williams @ 4:44 am

This blog entry was posted on September 6, 2011.

“Adding a blog to your website is the best way to build up the search rankings of your website on Google and to attract targeted visitor traffic.”Doug Williams February 2010. It is much better than having your blog on a separate website.

I finally followed my own advice just 3 weeks ago. I started my own blog on webdesignseo.com 4-1/2 years ago. At that time I thought it would be more powerful to have a separate blog that I could then link to my website with and that would best help get more traffic to my website.

What happened was that my blog became very popular and attracted all sorts of traffic, but not my website. I developed a great following; so much so, I was reluctant to move the blog for fear I would lose my audience.

In June of this year, I decided to revamp my website to focus on SEO and traffic strategies and then combine my blog onto my website.

In mid-August my new website went live. I relocated my blog and its over 4 years of content to dougwilliams.com/blog (not a subdomain) so my entire website would benefit from the natural link attraction of my blog. A did a 301 redirect from webdesignseo.com (my old blog URL) to eliminate the possibility of duplicate content.

After just 3 weeks I am seeing the traffic to my new blog location is the same as my separate blog. My overall website traffic is up 400%. Rankings for my targeted keywords are improving very quickly and even better, I am seeing regular conversions (form request for quotes) from my website.

My only regret is why I didn’t do this sooner. More on blog marketing services.

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Filed under: Blog Marketing



Keyword Stuffing Can Be Harmful To Your Rankings

Doug Williams @ 4:56 am

This blog entry was posted on September 2, 2011.

Optimizing your web page is very much like living a healthy lifestyle. For a healthy lifestyle, you employ a balance of activity, nutrition and avoiding harmful factors such as smoking or stress. There is no quick fix or magic pill that will help you reach good health. Keyword stuffing is one of those harmful activities that are easily detected by search engines and affects the health of your rankings.

What is keyword stuffing? Keyword stuffing is a ten year old black hat “spamming” technique that tries to trick the search engines into giving higher rankings. It involves overloading Meta tags or page content with keywords.

Typically this is a very long list of keywords in the Keywords Meta tag or in the content there are paragraphs of random phrases with keywords repeated to create a certain “keyword density. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to the visitor or to search rankings. Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.

To create a healthy website that provides natural nutritious content to visitors and provides abundant rankings, try the following formula.

  1. Relevant keywords: Find the right, relevant keywords that focus on what your visitors are searching for.
  2. Original Content: Use these keywords in original, interesting text on your website pages. Keywords should be used naturally in heading tags, Title tags and the text content.
  3. Content Growth: Regularly add new, interesting and updated content that will give people a reason to keep returning.
  4. Encourage linking: People will link to facts and information that they find interesting. Try adding a blog to your website.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies