Home › Blog

The Most Important Tag for Your Website

There are a lot of untruths floating around the Web about SEO. I often hear them when clients bring them up to me. New ebooks on SEO are constantly popping up with headlines like, “Rank First on the Search Engines!” or “Learn the Secrets that SEO people won’t tell you!”

Well, as an SEO guru (and I was a guru long before most of the others, LOL), I’ll tell you right now, the most important tag in your website code is the title tag.

The title tells not only the search engines, but your users what the website is about. It should be no longer than 60 characters, and should have your most important keywords in it. But, it needs to be a title, NOT a string of keywords stuck together.

Here are some examples of titles that I have recently placed on websites:

Jewell Entertainment: Your Agency for Unforgettable Events (this is for an entertainment agency that places talent at events)

Tamara Alter: Unique Gemstone Jewelry (a jewelry designer)

Arenson Office Furniture: San Diego’s Workspace Solutions (office furniture store in San Diego)

Grand Entrances: San Diego’s Finest Custom Entry Doors (‘nuf said)

Once Upon A Favor: Wedding and Baby Shower Favors (wedding and party favors)

Now, once the title is correct on the home page, it needs to change for all the inner pages in order to reflect content. So, on the About Us page, the title would say: Once Upon A Favor: About Us and so on.

A lot of people make the mistake of just repeating the same title tag over and over. It does not help your users find their way through your website.



What is SMO?

A lot of people know about search engine optimization, or SEO, but SMO is a relatively new term. It stands for social media optimization and goes along with the phenom of “Web 2.0.” SMO is another technique to help a website or brand show up in the search engines.

Social media optimization basically includes placing a website/person/product/service on the various social media networks (Facebook, Ning, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.), and social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Mixx, BackFlip, Digg) so that the search engines see more inbound links.

The trick is to know which ones of the hundreds out there of social media sites are the best. One place to find this information is at my Squidoo page, Online Networking.

Another interesting ebook is The Definitive Guide to Finding the Best Social Marketing Sites . Bill Ortell has taken the time to go through the many sites and subject them to specific criteria. He examines social networks, bookmarking sites, and video sites. I heartily recommend this book as an excellent place to start.



A New Type of FFA site

FFA, or Free-For-All websites, have returned. These are sites that just have lists of links with little or no content (a.k. “link farms”). The new ones are claiming to be classified ad sites, with small ads and links. The way to tell that it is an FFA page is the fact that once your “ad” is posted, it will fall to the bottom and disappear as soon as enough other ads are posted. So you get an email telling you that you need to post it again. If you ignore this email, they do not go away, but will continue to pound away at you.



The Promises of Automatic Submission Programs

There are a lot of automatic submission (i.e. to search engines) programs online that promise a lot, but only deliver a little. A number of them claim that they submit to over x number of search engines. If the number is over 1,000, a red alarm light should go off! Usually, this number refers to FFA (Free-For-All or link farms) sites, or classified ad sites. You do NOT want your site submitted there.

A client asked me to look at a company that he was paying to do the submission of his website. After carefully checking through their list (they said it was at least 3,000 search engines and directories), I found that there were only 304 actual websites. And, of those, only 26 were real search engines, and 16 were pay-per-click search engines. The other links included dead sites, foreign language sites that do not accept English language websites, meta search engines that do not even accept submissions, and a number of sites that had nothing to do with search engines at all!

There are also a number of programs that will submit your site to directories for a fee. Unfortunately, the program submits the website blindly to any directory it has in its list. As a result, your site gets submitted to directories that have nothing to do with your field. One client, who sells Turkish cotton bathrobes, found his site had been submitted to a Greek tourism directory.

When I submit a website to a search engine or directory, I know that the site will accept the link because I have done the research.



Explaining SEO to clients

This is an excellent post on how to explain why search engine optimization is so important to clients.

The Most Powerful SEO Tactic: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify



Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Many people decide, when faced with the fact that they need a website, to go the inexpensive route. They hire a nephew, the kid who lives down the block, or someone who charges under $100 for a website.

This is a very bad idea in a number of ways. A website should reflect both how you want to be seen online, and that you are ready to do business online. Having a cheap website, or one that cannot handle changes in browsers, detracts from this purpose.

A number of clients have discovered this. By going the less expensive way, they end up having to fork over a lot of money further down the line.

I do not advocate spending more than your business can afford on a website, nor am I suggesting that you need all the newest bells and whistles on your site.You need a site that can withstand the test of time and change that occurs online.

The best way is by having a straightforward website that presents your business in a professional way and that can be changed, if the need arises.



Are you #1 in Google? It Doesn’t Matter

A wonderful article on why ranking #1 in Google is no longer as important as it once was. I so agree with this.

Are you #1 in Google? It Doesn’t Matter



Selecting a Domain Name

How do you select the best domain name for your website URL? Not all of the “good” names have been taken. In fact, a lot of domains expire every day.

You need to find a domain name that has keywords in it that are relevant to your topic. Contrary to rumor, hyphenated domain names are fine. The search engines see the keywords with or without the hyphens.

Keep the domain name short, if possible. It will be easier to remember. Initials can be confusing, so stay away from them. If you have a company name, use that for the domain name. You can have domains that are “parked” (i.e. sitting on the register’s server) that will forward the user to the correct site (called a “redirect”).

Nameboy is a free service and domain register that will tell you if a domain name is available, and will also give suggestions with different combinations of your keywords.

I recommend getting both the domain name with and without hyphens. You should try to buy both the “.com” and “.net” domains. The others do not yet attract much attention. The “.org” is used for organizations (or at least it started out that way), and the “.biz”, and “.info” has not yet caught on.



The new HOT topic is SEO

Apparently, everyone is now talking about and claiming that they can do search engine optimization. The amount of misinformation flying around the Web is amazing!

Search engine optimization is not easy, nor is it magic. It is a lot of hard work and keyword research and requires a deep level of understanding of both the search engines and their users.

I keep getting emails from marketers that says that this automated program or that software will do SEO for you. Unfortunately, many of these programs are actually a lot harder to use than just learning SEO.

Automated submission programs should be avoided (like the plague), and software often has a lot more bells and whistles to them than just doing the SEO.

Another problem is that software is rarely updated as fast as the search engines change. Unless you can find a program that does regular updating of itself, I suggest avoiding these sorts of programs.