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Web Development, SEO Consulting blog: latest AMTdev entries
Are You Committing Search Engine Suicide?
Has your company invested in a website but you're not getting the results you expected when it comes to visitors to your site? Before you go off and hire a fancy search engine optimization guru, you may want to do a little research on your own because the solution to your problem may be simpler than you think.
This series of posts will explain some basic criteria that should be plainly visible on your web site that contribute to how easily your web site pages can be found and subsequently indexed by search engines. If your site is lacking in any of these areas, then a few simple modifications may be all that is standing between you and an increase in traffic from search engines.
Issue #1: Neglecting the Page Title <title> Tag
Open a web browser and go to your web site. Look at the title bar of your browser located at the top of your browser window. Do you see some text that accurately describes the content of the page you’re on? Next, try clicking a link to a different page on your site. Did the page title change to describe the content on that page or did it stay the same?
Making sure each page on your web site has a descriptive, keyword rich <title> tag that summarizes the content on the page being viewed is a very important factor that helps search engines when indexing your site. It is also a common aspect of web site development that gets overlooked. (Isn’t the marketing department supposed to be in charge of SEO?)
The bottom line is that your title tag is of little use to search engines if every page has the same title.
Furthermore, the page title is typically displayed as the headline for search engine results and can be used as a call to action to increase the possibility of someone actually clicking through from the search engine results page to your site.
Another compelling reason to set page titles is because they are commonly used as link anchor text by other sites that link to you. Your rankings can benefit from these “inbound” links with anchor text that is semantically related to the page’s content.
Other issues to consider when setting a page title are length and position. It is generally a good practice to keep your page titles between 40 and 60 characters long and position them immediately below the <head> tag.
Now that you have a good grasp on title tags, our next post will focus on how your use of images can kill your search engine marketing efforts.