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Constructing the Perfect Title Tag joepreston in SEO March 31st, 2008

In the previous post about good SEO for your title tag, I answered the big questions about the title tag, showed you where it was and demonstrated its importance. Bona fides established,letsmake a good one. There are a lot of wholesalers and retailers I could pick on for bad title tags, but that’s no fun so I’m going to pick a random web page,and we’re going to improve it’s title tags to get free traffic and better rankings from search engines.

I don’t live in or anywhere near San Diego,but that’s the epicenter of the wholesale merchandise industry, the metro area that is home to Top Ten Wholesale, and as good a place as any to find a local business who could use a good title tag. My super SEO sense tells me that something where people are going tobe searching for things like you, but not necessarily your particular site is restaurants.  Who’s going to be searching for a local restaurant? All kinds of folks, maybe:

someone wants to get your phone number for a reservation

someone is Googling for a place to eat lunch,

a tourist or or a business traveler who doesn’t trust that crappy binder they leave next to the phone in your hotel room.

What are these potential customers going to use to search for you

reservation booker = “your restaurant name” or maybe “a common misspelling of your restaurant name”

local luncher = “mexican food San Diego” or  “downtown buffet San Diego” or “drink specials San Diego”

tourist = “mexican food san diego” “pizza delivery san diego” something pretty general they have no specialized knowledge

So if you wanted to use your title tag to get all these guys viasearch engines your title tag would be some combination of “your restaurant name” “delivery” “drink specials” “buffet” and don’t forget “mexican food San Diego”

You will want to use the largest volume term that describes you perfectly first. So if you operate a mexican food restaurant in San Diego, is it going to be “drink specials”? No, its going to be “mexican Food San Diego.” Why not use your restaurant name? Because I said the largest volume term, if you’re Tony Romo then you might more effectively capture visitors by naming your brand first, but if you aren’t, if you don’t have that name recognition(yet) then you need to remember two things.

1) Search engines will not establish your brand, they can reinforce it but they wont establish it

2) If you want to have a quality brand the first step is getting people in your door.

OK so Mexican Food San Diego but you dont have to stop there.Google indexes the first 65 characters of the title tag, Yahoo the first 114. I love to be ranked #1 in Yahoo so I usually try to get the right title tag for both.

Mexican Food San Diego is 22 characters so I have plenty of room.Because I do my homework, or because I stopped sniffing glueI know that if 10 somebodies are looking for “mexican food” one or two of them will be looking for “mexican food restaurant” hence

Mexican Food Restaurant San Diego 33 characters

whats the next thing that describes me perfectly - make your choice is it your restaurant name or is it  your world famous enchilada buffet - I’m going with restaurant name

Mexican Food Restaurant San Diego - El Chupacabra 49 characters,oh my gosh so much space.

Mexican Food Restaurant San Diego - El Chupacabra - Buffet 58 characters

Mexican Food Restaurant San Diego - El Chupacabra - Buffet - Drink Specials - Private Parties

Its just easy, put yourself in the position of someone who needs to find your goods or your services via a search engine. What would you search for? Go through the various use cases (local luncher, hungry tourist, party planner) collect those phrases,select in order of the phrases that target you specifically and put the largest volume search terms first.

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The #1 SEO Technique For Your Wholesale Web Site joepreston in SEO March 31st, 2008

A Search Engine Optimized (SEO) Title Tag is the single most important thing you can do to get free traffic to your wholesale web site.

Q: What is a title tag?

A: The title tag is an informational tag that goes in the <HEAD> section of any web page.It is optional but almost every page has one. On all the browsers I know of,the title tag contents are displayed in the bar at the top of the browser window. Here’s a screenshot of my browser window

See it? Up there at the top. I made it pink (kind of)! Where it says Top Ten Wholesale Blog> Edit — Wordpress-Mozilla FIrefox. That’s your title tag..

Why is the title tag so important to SEO?

Anyway, the title tag is really important. But, don’t take the word of the foremost SEO for the wholesale industry, take the word of a survey of 35 “expert” SEOs surveyed for the most important search engine ranking factors. Well, there’s quite a few experts and quite a few people who are popular at conferences but couldn’t SEO a Wikipedia page,and a few that are just inexplicable like Shoemoney, who isn’t an SEO, doesn’t pretend to be, but knows the value of a good backlink when he sees one. But in any event, SEOs and their ilk tend to agree its important. Need more convincing, then please note that it’s one of the few specific on page factors mentioned in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Frankly, that’s all the evidence you need that its VERY important. Google wants descriptive and accurate title tags, because they rank pages according to this criteria.

What’s the best title tag for SEO?

There is a terribly simple answer to this question. The best title tag is different for every page on your site, but the best title tag describes your business objective for that page. That’s the criteria that you want search engines to rank you on, at least I think it is.

If you sell wholesale lingerie on a certain web page, what else do you want Google for other than wholesale lingerie? Sure,you might also want them to know about wholesale corsets, wholesale teddies, wholesale bra and panty sets, but if you are trying to optimize for more than one phrase per page on terms where you have plenty of competition, you are limiting the success potential for your website instead of doing the basic work of web development that helps your site rise in the rankings of Google and other search engines.

Should I put my company name in the title tag?

Your company name is likely ineffective for search engine purposes. Your company name relates most strongly tothe branding of your site. Branding is still significant, but there’s a great difference on the subject of branding, and SEO’s who all seem to secretly dream of becoming a rich advertising executive like Don Draper from Mad Men will give you as much hoohah as anyone on this subject.

this man does not got to search engine conferences

And so you will find plenty,and I do mean plenty of SEO’s who will still tell you to put your company name in the title tag. I get branding, I swear I do. You know where I do my branding? On the invoice! On the newsletter I send you after you buy from me! If you want repeat business,you have to get the initial business first!

As before, What do you want a searcher to know: “I am Company X” or “I sell wholesale lingerie” And yes, is possible to do both, but the search engines restrict the amount of text they will read in from the title tag quite severely, as a result every character in your title tag is the most important SEO real estate on your web page.

There’s no reason to leave your company name out of your title tag entirely,but it is merely one of the elements of a good title tag, and including it or not is based on the overall evaluation of what is optimal for the individual page and secondarily, the overall web site.

More on this in the next post

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SEO: Estimate the traffic of a #1 Google position joepreston in SEO, A Winner is You! March 14th, 2008

How much traffic can I get from a #1 ranking in Google?

A question that people always want to know is how much is a google #1 ranking worth. The answer is obviously going to be pretty different based on the keyword’s popularity among human beings who search for it. Obviously, you have some insight into this if you have a site ranking well already. But, suppose you don’t. People will give you BS advice like running test campaigns in adsense, which will tell you many things, but it won’t tell you how popular the top organic result is going to be. Let’s break it down to what we can know about Google results in a general fashion.

We can tell how popular each position on the front page of Google is going to be.

h/t to Marketing Hub

Now google mucks around with the page composition at the top of their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) constantly. And this chart may predate OneBox

but, this is still prety much what most Google SERPs look like at my house. Note that among other things, it confirm the belief that #10 is worth more than #9 in terms of traffic. Anyway, now we know the percentage clickthrough share that a Google position has. But that means nothing unless we know something about traffic volume, which means we are flailing around helplessly like a bird wthout feathers. “Help, Uncle Joe!” We would need traffic data for a site that holds a position on the search term we are interested in - and we can’t get that. Should we use Alexa?

Luckily there is a site that ranks well on a bazillion search terms, and makes their traffic stats public.

It’s Wikipedia! Yes, Wikipedia, the vaguely accurate behemoth beloved by lazy high-school students and their mature form, the lazy blogger. Wikipedia makes their stats public! Here’s a handy little tool to query Wikipedia traffic stats

So if we have a term in wikipedia we can get a rough estimate of its traffic. Now, a lot of that traffic isn’t from Google, but I bet you a whole lot of it is. Estimates of Google’s market share in search are easy to come by but differ widely, between about 40% and 75%. I’m going to peg it at 50% because I think the lowest estimate takes an overly negative view of the effectiveness of individual google searches, and 10% roughly matches my statistics on how many Google referrals are repeats from the same user in a quick period of time.

Case Study For Estimating Traffic From a Google #1 - monkey

Let’s say you wanted to be #1 for monkey. Wikipedia received 130656 visits to that page in February 2008. I’m going to pretend that all of its traffic came from search, and I think an awful lot of it does come from search but certainly not all of it. Monkey happens to be #1 on Google, on Yahoo and on MSN, which means it should get optimal traffic from everyone, and then based on our earlier assumption, Google is going to get half of that or 65328 a month. #1 on the google serps page is going to get 56% of the available traffic or 36583. #2 is going to get about 8800 visits. That’s plenty to optimize for.

Anyway, this back of the napkin stuff is fun, and I think that if you worked hard on the fudge factors like what share of wkipedia traffic comes from Google, you have a method for doing this that is more accurate than using a PPC keyword service or Hitwise to estimate this.

The site with the wikipedia traffic stats also has a cool list of the top Wiki pages by traffic, which is a good read if you’re geeking out on SEO or you are developing your very own spam blog.

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Q&A on Blogging and Link Building joepreston in Helpful Tools, Issues In Search, SEO January 14th, 2008

This post is about increasing traffic to your blogs. I’m surprised about how lame and lousy answers you get from searching Google about this crap. You will get much better advice at bloggerunleashed.com but that guy is drunk all the time, he’s like the Boris Yeltsin of SEO.

Sharp-eyed reader Justin P. left a comment:

I’ve been dying to learn more about effective blogging and link building…what’s the deal?

I’m happy to disclose that Justin is a member of the Top Ten Wholesale team, but this is not a plant. I’m pretty sure he does want to know about this stuff, and I didn’t solicit this question in any way. And, I consider publicly answering your readers question part of the best practices for effective blogging. The great thing is even though that’s a pretty expansive question, blogging and link building go hand in hand. In that, posting to your blog is an outstanding way to build links.

1) RSS Feeds - If you use your RSS Feed right you can gain links. The audience of people subscribing to feeds are hard core information consumers. I have my own linkblog just of posts I read that I share. Lots of bloggers, marketers, and web publishers. But, all those people are making websites designed to go out to a general audience and they always need content. It’s very nice when they reference your content and provide a link. In fact that’s great when they do that. Sometimes, they may not do that, sometimes they may not send a link back and just republish your work. People get really upset about these guys and start talking about how they hate “content thieves” with lots of capital letters and exclamation points, but I don’t waste time with getting mad at invisible people and their web sites. I try to do what I can to make it work better for me. One of the keys to maximizing the links you get from your content is to use a footer on your posts with your links in it. I use a wordpress plugin called Feed Footer, and there is another good one called RSS Footer. RSS footer is super simple and very effective. Feed Footer offers granular control of what you do with your footer and is a very powerful tool in the hands of the right person. It’s entirely appropriate in my opinion to add other related sites to your footer. If you are writing great posts, this will really help you generate more links.

2. Blog Directories

When you are starting the marketing process for a new blog. Blog directories like BlogCatalog are a tempting prospect, but getting backlinks with a wordpress blog is cake, so what’s the point of it? Meaning is there traffic for you? I think there is if you are targeting them precisely. Trackbacks are going to get heavily discounted based on the pagerank value of the referring site soon, so I wouldn’t bother too much with them. I think you have to write comments on big blogs, and get them past moderation. At this point I say avoid the larger directories like mybloglog and bumpzee. I get a little bit of seo traffic so sphinn does ok.

3. “SEO 2.0 is about link love” — Dofollow=Groovy

So you gotta give me a dofollow..

That means install the dofollow plugin. Try to enjoy it while it lasts. What will kill it is organized rings of dofollowers, who start to moderate there posts ruthlessly throwing out people from the wrong side of the tracks like me. Those guys will grow like mold in pligg sites, or BloggingZoom, which you should not run on your blog! It is unsafe, I had it checked out by the somber titans of the toptenwholesale.com technical staff. By the way if you don’t pay attention to your programmer’s technical review of your easy-to-install plug-ins, you are an idiot, begging to be fired.

Posts I Like But Aren’t Super Related to this Because Who The Hell Writes Posts Like This One?:

A Valuable Tip - Use Pligg sites to get good longlasting backlinks.

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GET LINKS TO YOUR SITE: Easy Ways to Promote Your Site WIth Links joepreston in SEO, SEM, Small Business January 2nd, 2008

It’s extremely important to build links to your site. Links tend to help your web site rank higher in search engines. Links promote your site as trustworthy enough for others to endorse. And most of all, you build links in the hope that the links will send traffic. I like to build as many easy links as I can.

My Favorite Easy Link for a Web Site

My favorite easy link to build a link is at AboutUs.org, whcih lets you quickly create or edit a page about your site.

Write a Press Release About Your Site

You can do this continuously, and should especially if your business picks up an accolade or an honor. Top Ten Wholesale has issued several press releases if you are looking for an example. Or you can check out this recent blog post about writing effective press releases.

I’ll publish a guide to writing a press release in an upcoming blog post. But, once you have written the presser (that’s what “industry insiders” call a press release), how do you distribute it?

PRWeb is the biggest player in this space. And they have a great free distribution service - although I find that giving them $80 for a better distribution virtually guarantees a number of links to your site that will stick around for a long time.

There are a lot of really good press release distribution services where you can submit for free in addition to PRWeb, like PRNewsWire and URLWire Here’s a reasonably recent list of Free Press Release Services.

Of course, if you submit the same press release to all these sites, some of these will get flagged for duplicate content. Google tries very hard to screen out multiple pages with the same content and is partially effective at it. When I have time to maximize the amount of links from a presser, I will pick 6-10 services to submit to and literally rewrite the press release sentence by sentence. But, that’s the kind of obsessive behavior that I don’t endorse for others.

Quick ways to make multiple unique press releases.

• Write one and hire somebody to write one for you. Hire a pro like the one Top Ten uses, David Oates of Stalwart Communications or do it the Joe Preston El Cheapo Grande Way, and advertise to find a copywriter on Craigslist or a copywriters forum
• Target a local area or region with 1 press release and then write one for general national distribution.
• All the press releases I write have a quote. Change the quote, and change where you place the quote within the press release.

Comment on Blogs

This is really the easiest way to build links. Go to blogs, find posts where you have something to say. Make comments and include your link in the space provided. Don’t worry about only going to blogs related to your business. For the most part, and as long as you aren’t being shady, a link is a link is a link. For example, I don’t blog about football or have any football related sites, but I leave a lot of incredibly insightful comments (at least I think they are) at The Jets Blog Good blogs pay a lot of attention to the comments and screen them heavily, but if you have something to say this is one of the best ways to build quality links and its very easy.

More on this subject tomorrow…

Related Posts on Other Blogs

Writing Effective Press Releases

Tags: press releases, link building