How your web page titles can help you with local search

If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by the right people. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimize your web page titles.

What is the web page title?

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the tags in the HTML code of a web page. The web page title is displayed in the web browser window when someone visits your website and it is usually used as the linked text when your website appear in the search results.

Why is it important to use optimized web page titles?

The web page title is one of the main factors that Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank web pages. A good web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings.

In addition, the web page title is used as the bold linked text on search result pages. That means that it should be clear, concise and appealing so that web surfers click on it.

How to change your web page title so that it gets better local rankings

If you optimize your web page titles correctly, they will both increase your search engine rankings and they will attract people from the right local area to your website.

You’ll benefit from targeted traffic and you’ll get more sales than before. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:

Smith & Sons – The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear in London

Depending on your business size, change the order of these items. Well known businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it’s usually better to list the keyword first:

The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear: Smith & Sons in London

People are probably looking for a solution to their problem (inexpensive shoes) instead of your company name. Instead of your city, you can also use the name of the greater area if your service is available in that area.

Use a different title tag for every page. This is important. The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines:

Smith & Sons: About our London shoe shop
Smith & Sons: Buy inexpensive sneakers in London
Smith & Sons: The best prices for boots in London

Use short web page titles. Short titles are much easier to read for web surfers. Do not try to stuff keywords in your web page title. It is much more better if your website is highly relevant to one keyword than somewhat relevant to many keywords.

If you want to optimize your website for different keywords, optimize different pages for different keywords.

Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website might look strange in the search results.
If you change your web page titles as explained above, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people who live in the right area.

Do search engines think that your website is spam?

About three weeks ago, Microsoft was granted a new patent with the name Web Spam Classification Using Query Dependent Data. Although this patent application was filed by Microsoft, all major search engines probably use similar methods to classify web pages.

How do search engines analyze web pages?

Search engines look at a number of elements that can appear on web pages and within queries that web surfers use to find these pages.

For example, search engines may look for the most frequent keyword in the web page, the number of times a particular keyword appears in the web page, the domain name associated with the web page, the number of links pointing to the page, the HTML tags in which a keyword appears and many other factors.

The patent filing indicates that search engines look at hundreds of different factors to rank web pages.

How search engines try to detect spammy pages

The are so many potential spam pages on the Internet that search engines cannot identify all spam pages manually.

To identify potential spam pages, search engines might manually label some web pages as spam and then take information from that pages to find other spam pages.

For example, a web page that uses keyword stuffing has more keywords than a legitimate page. By training the spam detection algorithm with a few web pages that use keyword stuffing, other web pages that use keyword stuffing can be detected automatically.

In other words, a spam detection algorithm labels web pages as spam or not spam by looking at decisions made by humans. According to the patent application, the algorithm might look at the following factors:

• the number of inbound links coming from labeled spam pages
• the top level domain of the site
• the quality of phrases in the document and density of keywords (spammy terms)
• the count of the most frequent term
• the count of the number of unique terms
• the total number of terms and the number of words in the path
• the number of words in the title
• the rank of the domain and the average number of words
• the top-level domain
• the number of hits within a domain
• the number of users of a domain
• the number of hits on a URL and the number of users of a URL
• the date the URL was crawled, the last date page changed
• many more factors

If your website uses similar elements as the spammy web page then it’s likely that your website will be classified as spam. The usual impact of a website being labeled as spam is that the site might be pushed down in search results, or removed completely.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that your web pages use similar elements as the top ranked pages instead of elements that can be found on spam pages.

Five internal linking tips that will improve your search engine rankings

If you want your website to be indexed by search engines, it is important that your site has a good link architecture. The link architecture of your website is the method that you use to link from your website pages to other pages of your website.

How search engines find the web pages on your website

Search engines use so-called spiders or robots to index web pages. Search engine spiders are relatively simple software programs. When they visit your web pages, they follow all links that they can find on the page to index the other pages of your website. Most search engines follow only text links.

JavaScript menus, Flash menus and search boxes cannot be accessed by most search engine spiders. That means that search engines will only index the web pages of your website that can be easily found by their spiders.

Five internal linking tips that will improve your search engine rankings

Most search engine spiders do not type into your search boxes and they do not use pull down menus. The following tips will help you to make sure that search engine spiders will index your web pages correctly:

1. Use simple text links to link to your web pages

   Most search engines cannot index fancy Flash or JavaScript menus. Some even have difficulty with image links. If possible, use simple text links to link to your web pages. You can make text links prettier by styling them with CSS.

2. Your most important pages should not be more than one click away from the index page

   Web pages that can be accessed with a few clicks from your home page are considered more important than web pages that are buried deep inside your website. It’s easier to get high rankings for these easy to access pages.

3. Use descriptive link texts
   
   The text that you use to link to your web pages helps search engines to better understand your content. If you sell shoes on your website, do not use links such as <a href=”page.htm”>Click here</a> but descriptive link texts such as <a href=”page.htm”>business shoes</a>.

   That makes it easier for search engines to put the page into a context and it will be more likely that the page gets high rankings for the keyword “business shoes”.

4. Create a sitemap
   
   A sitemap is a simple web page that contains link to all important pages of your website. You could add a link to your sitemap in the footer of every web page. By doing this, search engines can find all important pages with two clicks.
5. Check the validity of your HTML code

   Errors in the HTML code of your web pages can prevent search engines from indexing your web pages correctly. For example, an HTML error might indicate the end of a web page before the actual content begins. That would mean that search engines would skip the content and any links of that page.

How long can a text link be if it should improve your rankings?

The words that are used in the links to your website have an effect on the search engine rankings of your website for these keywords. For example, if very many websites use the word “blue widget” to link to your website, it is likely that your website will get a high ranking on Google for the keyword “blue widget”.

How many keywords does Google consider?

It’s absolutely certain that Google considers the words in the links to your site. The question is, how many words or characters does Google count in a link? Is there an optimal length for text links? Blogger Shaun Anderson did a test to find the answer.

The test set-up

Shaun Anderson created a long text link with 50 nonsense words. Each of the nonsense words was 6 characters long. For example, he might have used a link like this:

wergsd woivsd mliwdc woiuby 3245sc plorxc werxcd …

Then he added that link to the home page of a website that has good rankings on Google.

After some time, Shaun did a search for a keyword that the linked website ranked number one for and added the nonsense words to the search. By doing so, Google would only list the site in the search results if links to the site contained the nonsense word.

For example, if a website has a number one ranking for “buy used cars in dallas” then the website will only be returned by Google for “buy used cars in dallas wergsd” if Google has indexed a link with the text “wergsd” that points to the website.

The result: the perfect length seems to be 55 characters

Out of the 50 words in the link text, Google counted eight. Everything after the eighth word was ignored. Eight words that consist of six characters make 48 characters. The seven spaces between these six words add up to a total of 55 characters.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that the important keywords come in the first 55 characters of the links that point to your website.

As many websites use the title of a web page to link to it, you should also consider the way you write your web page titles. If your important keywords are at the beginning of your web page titles, chances are that these keywords will also be used in the links to your site.

If you want to know if your web page titles are correct and if you also want to know if all other elements of your web page are ready for a top 10 ranking on Google, you should analyze your website now.