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Crafting Good Title Tags For SEO And Clickability August 17, 2010

Posted by admin in : internet , comments closed

It’s amazing to me, the number of people who still do not take proper advantage of the power of the title tag. The title tag, is arguably THE most important on-page factor in SEO (and much more as you’ll soon learn).

If you happen not to be too versed in HTML coding I’ll explain what the title tag is.

The title tag is found within the and tags of a webpage. It’s format is as follows:

Your Page Title Here

The title tag is important for two very simple reasons.

1) The title of the page is given an enormous amount of weight by the search engines. It always has and it always will. It’s of less importance today than it was 6 or 7 years ago, but it is still the most important on-the-page factor a page has. After all, it’s sole purpose is to describe the page so it *should* be considered important.

2) The title tag is also used as the anchor text of your listing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). When someone visits a search engine and runs a search for one of your products, if one of your pages comes up in that search, it is the title tag that the visitor will see (along with a short description) and be able to click on to visit that page.

The problem is a LOT of webmaster’s simply don’t understand or make proper use of the title tag. Instead of name the page using keywords relevant to that specific page, they use their company name, etc.

Unless you are FORD, GE, or some other multi-million dollar company you should NEVER have your company name or website name (unless it’s an SEO’ed website name) in the title tag. Are people going to be searching for your company or website name or are they going to be searching for keywords related to your product or service?

Let’s look at a quick example from a real search I ran earlier today:

So a ran a search for “lawn chairs” clicked to page number two and there sitting at #14 is a site with the title “Brookbend”.

Now, this particular site actually has a LOT wrong with it, but for now we’ll stick to the title tag, or lack-there-of as this particular site’s title tag actually just said “Untitled Document”. As a result, Google replaced that with the name from the URL which Google will often do when a webmaster does something stupid such as this. ;)

As I said, this particular listing was the 14th listing for “lawn chairs”. That is actually VERY good considering it doesn’t have a title tag. Imagine what it could have ranked if it had actually made use of the title tag? Possible using something along the lines of:

*Beautiful Outdoor Furniture, Lawn Chairs, Patio Tables*

Think they may have been able to achieve an even better rank? I would venture to say yes.

Now, there is also a second problem with their lack of a title tag and that is that their listing in the search engine is simply “Brookbend”. I don’t know about you, but if I’m looking for “lawn chairs” I’m probably not going to click on a listing that just says “Brookbend”. For one reason, it doesn’t contain either of the search terms I used in the title. For another thing, it isn’t very “clickable”.

You see, a title tag should do two things. It should incorporate that pages most important phrases and it should make someone want to click on it. You will notice in my above example, for the title I used “Beautiful Outdoor Furniture…”. That is because, while I wanted the keywords in there, I also wanted it to read well and entice the surfer to click on it. After all, it doesn’t do much good to get a top ranking if no one clicks on your listing.

So, when you are designing your pages always remember to:

1) Decide on what that pages target keywords are

2) Incorporate those keywords into the title tag of the page

3) Make sure the title tag is enticing enough to make the visitor WANT to click on it.

Do the above three consistently and you will see the results in no time.

See you at the top!

Link Building for Church Marketing March 2, 2010

Posted by admin in : SEO , comments closed

If optimizing a website is like giving your car a tune up, link building is like putting in a bigger engine. Simply put, there are going to be keywords that are out of your reach if all you do is on-page optimization, especially if your church is in a large city. Link building is needed to bring those keywords into your grasp. Links are like votes for your website. The more votes your website gets, the more important the search engines think your site is. That causes then to move you up in the search results for the keywords you are targeting and can get you ranking well for keywords for which you can’t currently rank well. So, what is link building and how do you do it? Read on my friend.

What is Link Building?

Simply put, link building is anything and everything you do to get people to link back to your site. You want someone to put a link on their site that leads to your site. These are known as inbound links. There are many strategies out there for how to link build, but in the end, the goal is the same: get as many links as possible from relevant sites.

What is the Best Link Building Strategy:

There are a lot of different strategies for link building. The reality is that there really isn’t a single, ultimate link building strategy. For some, one strategy will work better than others depending on your personality and the amount of time you put into the link building. Also, as time goes on, different strategies tend to trend as being more or less effective. Some strategies work well for a while and then general attitude of people starts to change and so your strategy has to change. You should also consider the other aspects of your church marketing plan church marketing plan and choose a link building strategy that works well with that church marketing plan.

My advice is to look around for different strategies and brainstorm for your own ideas and give them a shot. It’s best to use several different link building strategies as part of your search engine marketing plan. See which ones work best for you and which you enjoy (or at least don’t dread). After all, if you hate doing something, you’re not going put the time and effort you would need to in order to succeed. Go with what works and try new ideas as well. Remember, the Internet is always changing, so for the best results it good to keep trying new strategies. Social media (blogs, MySpace, YouTube, GodTube, etc.) are very popular right now, so be sure to consider ideas using the social media.

It’s Too Hard:

One of the biggest reasons that people don’t engage in a link campaign is that they think it will be too hard, or if they hire someone else to do it, it will be too expensive. As you will see in my next article (10 Link Building Strategies for Church Marketing), that’s not necessarily true. Yes, there are some strategies that are more difficult and can be very time consuming, but there are other strategies that are relatively simple or only have a short time commitment. Asking your members to link to the church site or offering something for free on your site are examples of strategies that don’t have to have an enormous time commitment. It may take a little time get the free information/tool on your site, but once it’s up, it takes very little maintenance. Registering with directories is a relatively simple strategy that can get you a lot of one-way links in a short period of time. It can take some time, but there are companies that offer good directory submission services that aren’t expensive. So, yes, it can be hard and time consuming to run an effective link building campaign, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of ways to get links relative easily, inexpensively, and without taking a lot of time.

In my next article I’ll give some ideas for link building strategies for church marketing.