SEO Google Search Ranking Optimization Tips – Titles and Title Tags

John Nasta — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:51:51 +0000

Here is a Google SEO optimization technique that anyone can employ on just about any web page. In a nutshell, write better titles and title tags.

Static web pages generally have a <title> tag in the <head> section of the document, and in many dynamically generated sites (blogs, ecommerce, etc.) the page’s Title tag is the same as the on-page title of the page, post, product, etc.

Search engines read up to 255 characters of the page title, but they weigh the relevance of those words based on the assumption that the most important word in the title is the very first word, and the importance of each subsequent word drops accordingly.

That’s why the first word of the title of this article is SEO. That is the single term that I thought people who might click on this article might be searching for. It is followed accordingly with what I felt were important keywords, and written in the exact order somebody might type those words (exact matches score higher). It’s no accident that the title of this article reads exactly the way it does. I want people to find it!

The search engines will also rank your site more favorably if your meta tags (keywords, description, title, etc.) are different for every page and tailored to the content of the page. Very common mistakes include giving every page the same title, no title, or having the first handful of words of every title the same.

Also, bear in mind that if you use a plural or longer form of a word, it will come up in search results for shorter forms of the word (e.g. use Lawyers instead of Law, etc.).

So, if you are a lawyer named John Smith who specializes in divorces and custody matters, you might want to have a page with a title like “Divorces Child Custody Family Lawyers Attorneys John Smith” rather than “John Smith Attorney at Law specializes in civil matters including divorce and child custody” because you want the most important buzz words, especially those that differentiate that page from the other pages on your site, at the front of your title.

Keywords and Descriptions also come into play and I will discuss those separately, but as you can see SEO begins when you write the first piece of content for your web site.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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SEO – Avoiding Duplicates with Canonical URL Tags

John Nasta — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:04:26 +0000

You may have seen my article about the Ultimate Noindex Nofollow tool for WordPress, but avoiding duplicate content can help the search engine ranking of any web site, including static sites.

Recently, Yahoo!, Live, and Google all agreed to support Canonical URL Tags. You put a line of code into the head section of your document like the one below:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.johnnasta.com/blog" />

This tells the search engines that this page URL should be regarded as a copy of johnnasta.com/blog and that any link or content metrics should be applied to that URL.

When your site contains multiple URLs to the same content (for example blogs and ecommerce platforms can contain links to the same articles or products via the home page, category pages, search results, etc. each creating its own path to the same article or product), your search ranking suffers. The search engines don’t know which ones to index or rank, and your metrics get spread out over all the streams instead of always pointing to the ultimate URL of the individual piece of content.

Examples of links that might point to the same content are:

http://johnnasta.com/blog/?category=1

and

http://johnnasta.com/blog

This happens because this article currently appears on both my home page as well as the page for the category that the post is assigned to, but the “real” URL to this post that I actually want Google to index is (currently):

http://johnnasta.com/blog/?p=296

(yeah, I know I haven’t dressed up my permalinks yet – one thing at a time)

Makes sense?

Share This!

SEO Google Search Ranking Optimization Tips – Titles and Title Tags Here is a Google SEO optimization technique that anyone can employ on just about any...
Excluding Your Web Site From Search Engines People often write about how to increase your search engine ranking by using noindex and...
WordPress SEO – Permalinks Options and Structure A great way to increase your blog’s search engine friendliness is to customize your permalink...

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SEO Google Search Ranking Optimization Tips – Titles and Title Tags

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

SEO – Avoiding Duplicates with Canonical URL Tags

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved