Sunday, August 31, 2008

The Impotance of Title Tag and Seo

Did you know the title tag is one of the most important elements of SEO?

Search engines will rank each page of your site based on how well it is optimized for certain keywords. Therefore, if you wanted a site to rank well for the keyword phrase "network attached storage" then you would create a page that was all about this phrase

.Makes sense, but without a properly written title tag the search engines may never rank your site well for the keyword phrase your targeting.

A title tag should be included on every page of your site. It tells the search engines what the page is specifically about. In the example above, if you were targeting the keyword phrase "network attached storage"

then you might want to have your title tag written with the following words: Network Attached StorageAlthough, I found out that having too many words in the title tag may not be a good thing.

Recently I was perplexed as to why my client was not ranking well for the phrase "network attached storage" on Google. In fact, they were no where to be found on Google for this phrase even though the phrase was in the title tag and there were a good number of sites linking to this page. I took a whole day comparing their page to competitor pages that ranked well on Google for the same phrase. I found a number of similarities including the number of inbound links to the page, page rank of the sites linking to the page, anchor text, keyword density, etc

The percentage of the keywords in the anchor text wasn't as high as the other sites and I noticed the competition had a few more sites linking to their pages, so I decided to focus my "off-page" optimization efforts on getting more sites to link to my client's "network attached storage" page.

Next, I focused my attention on "on-page" optimization. I noticed although the title tag had the words "network attached storage" in it, the tag read "network attached storage filers from..." As I mentioned previously, my client did not rank for "network attached storage" on Google, so I decided to type in "network attached storage filers" to see where the client would rank. The client ranked on the second page. To my suprise, just by adding that one keyword "filers" to the end of my keyword phrase made all the difference in where the page ranked in Google. So, I thought to myself what if I was to remove it from the title tag.

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