7 Essential Title Tag Strategies of High Ranking Web Pages

I am featuring here the best strategy, resource, article, newsclip that I came across recently by reading a ton of online marketing information.

Make sure you check back here regularly to get the latest and best from the online marketing world. You can also get the Hot Spot delivered by requesting your free newsletter here.


And the Winner "Best excerpt from the Online Marketing world" is:

The 7 Essential Title Tag Strategies of High Ranking Web Pages in 2006
John Heard, Head Researcher Planet Ocean Communications.

... The 'title' tag was, and still is, the single most important onpage element of high ranking webpages.

[You can find the 'title' tag in 'View Source' of your browser, at the top of the web page.]

Today the 'title' tag remains a critical component of top scoring webpages. While it's true that inbound links can cause a webpage to rank very well even if the keyword is missing from the body of the page, you'll seldom find a page without the keyword in the 'title' tag that ranks highly for a competitive search.


The 7 Essential Title Tag Strategies of Today's High Ranking WebPages

1. LENGTH OF TITLE

When creating titles for your webpages, remember that anything more than 63 characters is mostly superfluous. From a search engine ranking perspective, you should limit titles to only your best keywords while remembering that, typically, pages rank better when there is more than one keyword within the 'title' tag.


2. WORD PROXIMITY

Search engines actually do pay attention to the distance between words for multiple keyword searches. For example, in a search for Chevrolet Corvette, a webpage 'title' tag that contains these two words grouped together will typically hold a ranking advantage over another webpage with a 'title' tag such as Corvette, a legend by Chevrolet.

As for punctuation in the eyes of the search engines, Chevrolet/Corvette is on equal footing with Chevrolet Corvette, since the slash is regarded as just an empty space. Therefore, the engines view the distance between these keywords as exactly the same.


3. KEYWORD LOCATION

As a general rule, the closer you place your keyword to the beginning of the 'title' tag, the better the ranking advantage. However, bear in mind that we've seen fluctuations on this element from engine to engine and even from month to month. Regardless, on the whole, you can expect better results by placing your keywords first in your 'title' tag.


4. WORD ORDER

Consider the search dell computers. This will generate far different results than a search for computers dell. The search engines do pay attention to the linear order of your keywords, so be sure to position them in the most likely order that real people typically use when expressing them in everyday language.

However, be aware of the opportunities that may also be available when you switch the keyword order around. There may be instances where you'll find that reversing the keyword order sends good traffic with less competition.


5. REPETITIONS

Should you use the keyword more than once in the title? The answer is... it depends. First, let's talk about what not to do. Do not repeat keywords one after the other as in keyword, keyword, keyword.
However, there is no denying that a few pages that score well in specific keyphrase searches do, in fact, repeat keywords.

An appropriate use of repetition might look something like: Las Vegas - Sites and Attractions in the city of Las Vegas.

Regardless, you should keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of the top scoring sites do not repeat keywords within the 'title' tag. Once is usually enough.


6. TITLES OF HUMAN CONSUMPTION

There is one enduring constant of 'title' tag content creation that must remain a top priority, which is how well the text appeals to a human.

Because the 'title' tag is displayed as the headline for your page in the search results, its role is to motivate people to click your link. Therefore, the 'title' tag becomes the headline for your page. Its job is to reassure the searcher that, indeed, your page's content is all about exactly what they are looking for. Otherwise, why would anyone bother to click your link?


7. WHAT WORDS TO USE

By now it should be obvious that you should carefully select your best targeted keywords as your 'title' tag (duh!). However, it's surprising to see how many sites are apparently unaware of this very basic and simple fact of search engine marketing and optimization.

We are still seeing many, many web sites that use the same 'title' tag on every single page of their site, usually the company name or domain name. And, that's a huge mistake.

Now, if your site is guilty of committing this error, then you should probably jump up and down for joy! ...Why? Because your traffic is likely to substantially increase once you correct the error.
By inserting descriptive, keyword-rich 'title' tags into your webpages you'll be giving the engines exactly what they need to better index and rank your pages.

Remember that it isn't difficult to rank well for your company or domain name. After all, such names are usually relatively unique and consequently have little or no competition. In many cases, it isn't even necessary to include your company name in your 'title' tag to rank well in a your company name search.

And also be aware that your SE-knowledgable competitors will be rolling on the floor laughing at you if they ever see Untitled Document as your webpage title within the search results, a mistake caused by neglecting (forgetting?) to give the page any 'title' tag whatsoever!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by John Heard, Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com

{article shortened, see extended version on www.website-traffic-resources.com}.

Doing something about the world's climate change!

If you ever wanted to do something about the world's climate change, here is your chance!

Your help is needed for the world's largest ever climate experiment.


The Oxford University needs your computer power to run the world's largest climate change experiment!

To give you the essence here: You can 'donate' your computer's unused power to participate in this experiment. This experiment need thousands of people to help. All you have to do is to download the 'climate change experiment' program from the BBC website to your PC.

It is easy to do and 'runs in the back' meaning, you just carry on as before and you're making your contribution to the world at the same time.

Just download the program from the BBC website now at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/.


If you ever wondered what is going on with all these hurricans, the mudslides, the melting polar caps, the tons of snow this winter, there is a lot of information on the site too.

Here is a short statement from the organisers of that experiment giving you some background information:

Trying to predict climate change is hard. There are lots of factors involved – air temperature, sea temperature and cloud cover all play a part – as do dozens of other variables. Therefore, there are a huge number of calculations involved.

One solution is for scientists to use the largest supercomputer they can find. But even the biggest supercomputers are only so good.


We think you can do better.

Using a technique known as distributed computing, we’re hoping to harness the power of thousands of PCs around the world. If 10,000 people sign up, we’ll be faster than the world’s biggest computer. And we’re hoping to be even better than that.


What do we want you to do?

Use your model as a screensaver, and watch it progress as a detailed spinning globe.

Taking part is easy.

All we’re asking you to do is download a simple programme, which doubles as a screensaver. Once you’ve installed it, your computer will take care of the rest. You don’t have to send us anything. You don’t have to enter any data. In fact – if you decide not set the programme as your screensaver, you probably won’t even notice it’s there.

However, if you want to, you can follow the progress of your experiment on a 3D spinning globe.


If I’m not doing anything, how am I helping?

The experiment works by making use of your spare processing power. All you have to do is use your computer exactly as you normally would, and the programme will run calculations in the background. When it’s done, it will send results back to scientists in Oxford, who will combine everyone’s results. The more people who take part, the more complete their predictions about the future climate will be.

Take part in the experiment!

Just download the program from the BBC website now at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/

or go straight to download the experiment from the site.

A Website That Works

1. Perhaps the most important purpose of your website is to entice a visitor to give you their name and email address. As you will rarely if ever “sell” cold from a website, the email collection is the first, and most important, step in building a reservoir of people to market to, in the future.

Popular wisdom says that as soon as your reservoir is full of 1000 potential future customers then you will start to make sales as long as you keep topping up your fish stock level and keep your fish fed with high perceived value information (via a newsletter/ezine) and tickle them regularly about your products and services. If you have a very niche product or service, this figure drops to around 600.

2. The secondary purpose of a “website that works” is to stamp your unique personality on your site, to give your visitors a way to grow to “know, like and trust” you (while putting off the visitors that will never like you or buy from you – or who would just give you a hard time if they did). This is done via a blog. This can contain your own thoughts, articles, ideas OR feature other writers (with full accreditation of course).

3. The third purpose of a “website that works” is to contain all the information that a returning visitor will need to make a buying decision.

4. The fourth purpose of a "website that works" is to keep a visitor coming back to your site until a buying decision is made - the ezine and blog work together to do this.

5. The fifth purpose of a “website that works” is to make the buying process as automated and easy as possible.

6. The sixth purpose of a "website that works" is to generate enough traffic to be able to tell how the conversion of visitor (suspect) to ezine reader (prospect) is working. This is done using Google Adwords.

7. The seventh purpose of a "website that works" is to get picked up by the organic search results on the major search engines. This is done by a variety of methods, but your blog is key in this and it's essential that it's updated at least twice a week.

8. The eighth purpose of a "website that works" is to deliver meaningful statistics; unique visitors, conversion of unique visitors to ezine readers, subscribers to blog, conversion of ezine readers to sales, cost of acquiring each unique visitor, profit per unique visitor.

9. The ninth purpose of a "website that works" is to grow organically with your business, to be easy to update and change, to stay clear of gimmicks and distractions.

10. The tenth purpose of a "website that works" is to create passive income flows via Google Adsense income, eBay income (if appropriate), carefully chosen affiliate income from 3rd party products or services, sales of information products such as eprogrammes, ebooks, audio, video, home study courses.

p.s. I personally find this quite good but I have no idea who actually wrote it. So if you want to claim authorship, let me know.