Meta Tags can be so confusing when tending to your website’s SEO. So I thought I’d give a few tips on writing your site’s Title Tag. You might think that would be the easiest one, because most people put their business name as their Title Tag. But that’s actually, in most cases, the least beneficial thing you can do as far as SEO is concerned.

Title Tags are not meant to be your business name or title; they are meant to attract the search engines, and also potential customers. And in a lot of cases, your business name has very little SEO appeal. For example, let’s say you sell used books, and say your business name is Between the Shelves. That doesn’t exactly tell Google or potential customers what you sell. And in fact, since the first word of your Title Tag has the most relevance and most importance for Google, the word ‘Between’ is really a poor choice as the first word for your Title Tag. And as a result, your Title Tag would rank much lower than other used book websites, especially if they have the word, ‘Books’ as their first Title Tag word. So they are going to appear higher up in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) and will likely get the website traffic that you want!

Your Title Tag’s first word should have the most importance and relevance to what you sell in your store. So, if books are what you sell, then the obvious choice for the first word in your Title Tag should be ‘books.’ That’s probably one of, if not THE first keyword for your website too, so all the better if it’s the first in your website’s Title Tag.

And speaking of keywords, which are good to have in your Title Tag, don’t make the mistake of cramming your Title Tag full of too many keywords; or worse yet, an endless string of them. Google (or any SE) doesn’t like that and considers it spamming. The Title Tag should probably have only one or two keywords, so make them count and choose your most important one or two (at the most).

Then you also need to say something something else in your title, as briefly as possible, to get Google’s and searchers’ attention. You have 63-70 characters (which includes spaces) to get the attention of anyone who sees your website in the SERP’s. That is all that will display of your Title Tag. So you have to make those characters count. So the goal is always to get an important, relevant keyword at the front of the tag, followed by some important info about your store or service, that will grab the reader’s attention and make them choose your store’s link as the one they click on and visit from those results.

Using our used bookstore as an example, here’s an option.

Books – Used and New with the best prices Between the Shelves.

I managed to work in the business name at the end of that Title Tag example, which isn’t even necessary. But I liked the way it sounded. And it comes in at 62 characters, which is right where I want it to be to have the full Title Tag displayed. It gives you an idea too of how you can still work in the name, if you like, while keeping the important keyword at the front of the Tag…and still making it inviting to anyone searching for used books on Google and finding your link in the results.

So to sum it all up, here’s what you need for an effective Title Tag when creating your website’s Meta Tags:

• A relevant, important keyword at the front of the tag.

• One or two keywords, at most.

• Some important, inviting information about your store or service.

• Less than 70 characters, including spaces (63 should be your target number).

I hope this helps you master the art of writing a good Title Tag for your website. Meta Tags can be confusing, but with time, research, and a lot of patience, you can get your website’s SEO exactly where it needs to be.

Did you know that the speed of your website can affect your Google ranking? Website speed has been a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm since last year. Google says it’s not the most important factor, out of around 200 different ranking factors. But since it is a factor, it is worth paying at least a little attention to it.

In addition to Google, slow website speeds can have a detrimental affect on your business. Why? Because your customers do not want to sit around waiting for slow pages to load. And lets be realistic: not everyone can afford ultra-fast Internet connections. There are many, many people still on dial-up (yes, really!) or who have less than stellar connections. These people do not want to visit websites that take forever to load, so they will leave your website. And if they leave, you’ve just lost a potential sale.

So what are some things that can and do slow down your website?

• Images with Large File Sizes. This is one of the biggest culprits in slowing down a website. The more photos you have, the slower your site can become, if your file sizes are too large. In most cases, the file size of each of your images should be no larger than 50K. And if you’re website is on a shared server, they should be even smaller. So optimize all photos on your website. See our Graphics and Photo Tools page for a list of Image Optimization tools we recommend.
• Unnecessary Images. If you have cutesy little graphics all over your website (header graphics, divider graphics and such), these are unnecessary. They don’t help promote your products or services. They don’t enhance the quality of your customer service. They don’t serve a function, other than to look cute–and slow down your page!
• Hotlinked Images. I’ve talked before about Hotlinking.  This is when you are using HTML code to link to a photo on another website, in order to make it appear on your own site. It’s also called bandwidth theft and you really shouldn’t do it. Having a lot of images hosted elsewhere, rather than on your own site, can cause your site to slow down as it waits for images to load. And again, the more images you have like this, the worse the problem becomes.
• Slideshows and Videos. Sure they might be fun to look at (sometimes), but they seriously slow down your website. You don’t need these things to showcase your products. All you need are good, quality (well-optimized!) photos.
• Widgets, Widgets, Widgets. Music players, cursor trails, falling snowflakes (or leaves, or hearts, or flowers–ugh, I’ve seen them all) are a great way to slow down your website. And guess what? They’re annoying too! Do you see any of those things on the top shopping websites? No! And with good reason.
• Any Other External Codes. If you have too many external codes on your site it can definitely slow down the page load time. Tweet buttons. Share This buttons. Like buttons. Flash animations. Javascript. The more you have, the slower your site can become. So only use what is needed.

Again, site speed is not the number one factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. But it is a factor. So you should take it into consideration. A website that takes only a couple of seconds to load is considered fast, and that is a great goal. 2-5 seconds isn’t fast, but in many cases it’s good enough. But over 5 seconds? Houston, we have a problem.

Want to test your website’s speed? Here are some resources that can help.

iWeb Tool

Pingdom

Page Speed Online

Web Site Optimization

LinkVendor Website Speed Test

Speed isn’t everything, but Google rankings aside, you don’t want your website to be slow for your customers. They will be only too happy to leave your website to go to a faster one, and take their money with them.

Just a quick link to share from the Search Engine Land blog. It’s a fabulous article that gives a lot of extremely helpful information on whether or not and how social signals are impacting website page ranks at Google and Bing.

What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?

Read that article to find out how Twitter data in particular plays a role in web search results, and how data from both Twitter and Facebook is now being used–or may be used in the future–with regard to search engine results.

I’ve talked about this before at OBJ but like a good wine, good SEO talk never goes out of style. Google Page Rank is worth talking about from time to time, even if it might not be as important as it was once perceived to be.

As a refresher and simply put, Google’s Page Rank is basically Google’s way of displaying how valuable a website is. The rank is a number between 1 to 10, with one being the lowest and ten the highest. Most websites rank between 1-3, but the goal is always the same: a higher rank.

But does Page Rank still matter? I found a great article on this topic on the Turbo Social Media blog that I think explains this very well, so I thought I’d share the link to that site with you.

Does Google’s PageRank Still Matter?

Keeping informed about PR and SEO in general is always an important tool in creating your success for your online business.

In my last post called Link Party Anyone? I talked about joining link parties to help generate some traffic to your blog. I thought it was important that I now talk about Link Parties and SEO, and what link parties can’t do for your own blog or website’s SEO. And additionally, I’ll talk about comments and links as well.

When you join a link party, the link that you leave to your own blog or website does NOT get noticed by the search engines. Many people do not realize this; even I didn’t realize this for a long time, to be honest. Nor do most people realize that when you leave a comment on a blog along with a link to your blog or website, in most cases, that comment link also does NOT get noticed by the search engines.

In the case of link parties, widgets and java scripts generate the link party forms on a blog from the link party host (like InLinkz or LinkyTools, the two most popular link party hosts). That means that the links that are left by participants in the link party are all stored at the link party host. And those links are set to NoFollow by default, which prevents Google and other search engines from following those links. If this weren’t the case, not only could spam become a big problem, but websites could get a seriously inflated and false page rank, just by joining lots of link parties. And Google doesn’t want that.

Likewise, most blog platforms, like Blogger and the free hosted Word Press, have comments set to NoFollow by default in the template, preventing any search engines from following links left with comments. And they do this for the same reasons noted above. If you want search engines to follow the links left with comments on your own blog, you have to modify the NoFollow rule to become a DoFollow. How you do that depends upon which blog platform you use. You can also consider switching to another commenting system, one which creates DoFollow links, like CommentLuv or IntenseDebate.

Link parties and blog comment links are still a good way to get some human traffic to your business or personal blog or website, regardless of the NoFollow/DoFollow status of the blog in question. But I wanted you to be aware of the SEO aspect of link parties and comment links, so that you will understand exactly what to expect when you leave your website link in those places.

Backlinks are very important for your site’s link popularity and placement in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages), so it’s always a good idea to keep a watchful eye on how many you have. Quantity is important, but so is quality, where backlinks are concerned.

The Comment Luv network also has a search feature for all its Comment Luv enabled blogs, which allows you to enter a keyword and find all the related posts on that topic on Comment Luv enabled blogs.

They’ve also created a Twitterlink for Comments plugin, which will let commenters include their Twitter user name in the comments too. So you tweet peeps can enjoy the luv as well.

I’m using Comment Luv on two of my blogs at the moment and plan to add it to OBJ too. I see the plugin being used on all sorts of blogs these days. And you can register your blog’s URL for free, without even using the plugin.  It’s a great way to network, or even just to find other blogs you might be interested in, or that may be related to your business (if you have a business blog). Worth a peek at least.

No matter what your business-related reason for blogging, good SEO is essential for your blog, just as it is for any other website. And one thing you can do to help improve your blog’s SEO is to add meta tags to the Template. If you aren’t sure how to do that, here are some simple directions for doing so.

NOTE: The content editor in this WordPress site tends to alter things in HTML code and they don’t display correctly on the page. This generally affects apostrophes and quotation marks. When you copy the code below, please retype the apostrophes and quotation marks yourself, before pasting the code in your Blogger template. Otherwise, it may not work. And be sure to work in a plain text document, rather than a word processor like Word or Works, etc. Those programs also tend to reformat HTML code.

1. Login to your account at Blogger.
2. Click on Layout, and then click on Edit HTML.
3. Search for the following bit of code, which will likely be near the top of the template.

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

4.  Directly underneath that bit of code, paste the following code:

<meta content=’PUT DESCRIPTION HERE’ name=”description”/>
<meta content=’PUT KEYWORDS HERE’ name=”keywords”/>
<meta content=’PUT AUTHOR NAME HERE’ name=”author”/>

Be sure to replace the content for your Description, Keywords, and Author Name, where indicated. And don’t forget to save  your changes.

]]> http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2010/02/add-meta-tags-to-your-blogger-blog/feed/ 10 http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/10/bye-bye-page-rank/ http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/10/bye-bye-page-rank/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:54:50 +0000 admin http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/?p=538 I just read an article that I thought I would share with you. The content describes how Google is doing away with Page Rank from Webmaster Tools. For anyone interested, follow the link below for more information.

So Long Google Page Rank