Top Ten Wholesale Blog » Blog Archive » Constructing the Perfect Title Tag

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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