You may not be familiar with the term “long tail keyword”, but it is a simple concept really. If you are one to watch the statistics on your web site (if you’re not, you should), then you would know that sometimes people will find your web site using the most unusual phraseology.

Unusual phrases, the ones that are very targeted and specific, are referred to as the long tail. In short, it is the sweet spot of searchers that know exactly what they want. However, the downside is there are a lot fewer searchers that ride out there on the long tail.

Many Internet marketers make a great income focusing their marketing efforts using long tail strategies. The magic that makes it work is a searcher that knows exactly what they want and a web site that provides it.

Using a long tail keyword strategy is really no different than thinking in terms of niches, and as you may know, “there are riches in niches!”

Each web page on your web site is a niche, and it should be treated as a separate entity. Each individual page should have its own audience, marketing plan, and on-page search engine optimization (SEO).

Looking at a typical shopping cart, assuming you are selling books, there are hundreds of individual pages and each page is dedicated to an individual book. Think of Amazon.com as a book search engine, and each time a person enters a book title into Amazon.com, the results displayed contain all the web sites known to Amazon.com as having that book for sale. If you have never shopped on Amazon.com, I encourage you to search out a book, you will find that Amazon will usually stock the book and will offer to sell it to you; however, they will also display all the online used bookstores that you could also purchase from.

The top search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are no different than Amazon.com. When a searcher enters a particular book title, the search engines are displaying pages when the book title is somewhere on the page. The search engines will not display the homepage simply because the web site as a whole has that book somewhere on it. A common misconception is the search engines see your entire web site as a whole, when in reality the search engine only sees one page at a time.

Take this one step further and put yourself in the shoes of a person searching for this book. Notice, I did not say your company. Assume that this potential customer does not know your company name, for that matter, they don’t even know you exist, or that you have the book they are looking for. This potential customer will enter a search string into the search box of their favorite search engine, and it is quite possible that it is not even the correct title of the book. So, how are they supposed to find you?

Looking at all your pages as individual marketing vehicles, we will take this example just one more step. If you carry a book on your website with the title, “SEO in Five Minutes or Less” and with a little research you find that there are a lot of people that enter “SEO in Minutes” in the search engines. You now know the web page that has the book “SEO in Five Minutes or Less” needs to contain the term “SEO in Minutes” somewhere on the page, several times if possible.

Using the Google Adwords Keyword tool is a good place to start to find those unique phrases that you should have contained on a given web page. There is also the capability to look at an individual page as Google sees is and identify if there are keywords that you are missing.

What you should come away with:

• Treat each web page as its own niche
• Each web page on a web site has a different audience
• Direct visitors to internal pages – they can find their way to the homepage if needed
• Know what terms are being searched for and make sure they are on the web page

Think like a professional SEO expert and see each web page on your web site as its own freestanding entity.

SEO - Don't Force the Wrong Keywords

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is really not about the search engine at all.  It begins with a problem, and someone willing to search out the answer to that problem.

When you think about what product or service you provide, what problems are you answering?  The root of knowing what you need to optimize for is based in knowing the problems that people have and the words that they will use to search for an answer.

When we are in a very technical profession, or one that has a lot of industry jargon, the risk we take is optimizing for the wrong words.  We optimize the jargon and not what the end user is searching for.

For example, search engine optimization is a very technical term.  Don’t get me wrong there are many savvy users out there that know that when it comes to getting your web site to rank high in the search engines, they need a little SEO.  However, most of the users out there would not know what to search for, they just have problem…their web site needs to be found.

In short, those potential customers may put a search in their favorite search engine for “market my web site” or “get my website listed on Google” or maybe even “get people to my web site”.  There is a huge difference in the search terms, notice that the terms mentioned don’t even contain the word “search engine” or optimization, and most definitely don’t have “SEO”.

So, when you are thinking about what problem your product or service solves, think about how the customer is going to search to find you.  Sometimes the most important source of this information comes from the customers themselves, especially the new ones.

For the next week, use some of your industry jargon.  See what the response is.  Do they ask you to repeat what you just said?  Do they ask you what it is? Do they guess and ask if they are correct?

Pay particular attention to the customers that will guess, this is information is priceless, as this customer is providing you the misconceptions about your business.

Take search engine optimization as an example.  When we are out networking and attending social events, it is inevitable that people will ask what we do.  Our response always starts with, “Search engine optimization and Internet marketing…” Why? We want to know what people know and don’t know about what we do – again priceless information.

For us, one of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is customers thinking that it means we find the best search engines that work well with their web site, thus listing it higher in the results.

What can we do with this information?  When we are looking at the problem our company solves, and how people may look for that information now we may want to look at a new phrase.  Perhaps we now know that people look for us by typing in “best search engine for my web site”.

Sure, we understand this is not really what we do, but the important part is our potential customer thinks this is what we do.

This does not mean that the phrase is something we will optimize for right away, the keywords get added to our list and we will evaluate other factors to see if the phrase has a high enough search volume.

In short, look to your new customers to find ideas of what phrases they would use to find you online and make sure that you are optimizing for the ones that make sense to.

This of course is just a brief overview of what to do, but in our Total Domination Mentorship program we will show you how to find out if the keywords are the right ones and also give you ways that you can incorporate those keywords into your SEO plan.

On the first day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
a website with a good plan

On the second day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the third day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the fourth day of Christmas

my SEO Expert says:
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the fifth day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the sixth day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Six entry pages
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the seventh day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Seven Dugg articles
Six entry pages
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the eighth day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Eight spiders crawling
Seven Dugg articles
Six entry pages
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the ninth day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Nine new conversions
Eight spiders crawling
Seven Dugg articles
Six entry pages
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the tenth day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Ten keywords added
Nine new conversions
Eight spiders crawling
Seven Dugg articles
Six entry pages
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the eleventh day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Eleven indexed pages
Ten keywords added
Nine new conversions
Eight spiders crawling
Seven Dugg articles
Six entry pages
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my SEO Expert says:
Twelve long tail keywords
Eleven indexed pages
Ten keywords added
Nine new conversions
Eight spiders crawling
Seven Dugg articles
Six entry pages
Five deep links
Four social sites
Three back links
Two title tags
and a website with a good plan

From Kettlewell Enterprises – Happy Holidays!

I saw this two minute segment of Survivor this past Sunday when I was walking back to my office, this is the only two minutes of this season that I have seen.  What struck me was the relevance of what he did to win that one million dollars and what it takes to win one million loyal customers.

Wow what a leap!  No, not really.  He won because every time he saw something he took note of it, or if possible he put it in his pocket.  For those marketing any type of product or service, squirreling away information is by far the most important task of any marketing effort.

I am reminded of how Joe Girard would collect information about each and every prospect that he spoke with and he would add to that information after each additional contact.  He referred to this as his intelligence system.  Every business needs an intelligence system.

In the Internet marketing world it is called list building.  A list is nothing unless you have the information and you know how to use it.  Survivor Bob not only knew that he might need a piece of string; he also found the perfect opportunity to use the string.

For most that market online, the list building starts and ends with the name and email address of the prospects.  That is just the piece of string, it is just the start!

Once the email address is captured the next goal is to find each and every opportunity to gather more information about that prospect.  Try some of these ideas to beef up your list:

1. Find something that you can send to your list, be it a free report, a training dvd, or an industry relative gift.  This gets you a physical address.
2. If appropriate for your industry, offer a wish list service.  This gets you a spouse’s name, or other family member names, and what products they are interested in.
3. Teleconference where your customers can email in ahead of time their questions.  This get’s you an interest point they have in your services.

Each and every time a customer talks to you on the phone, or contacts you by email, think of those contacts as strings.  Your job is to pick up the string, put it in your intelligence system whether it be a 3×5 index card system, or an elaborate database.

Now that you have the information gathered, what do you do with all of the new bits of information that you have.

This is what will set you apart from you competition.  This is the key to dominating whatever industry you are in.

Targeted and focused marketing efforts:

1. Send out a very targeted direct mail piece, make it personalized.  A special savings on a product that this target audience is interested in is a nice way to invite a customer back, but take it one step further and think like Amazon.  Offer a few selections that they may be interested in based on what you know about them.
2. Offer a very specific teleconference or seminar that targets a very unique group of people.  For example, if you find that many of your clients are MLM based companies, why not find a way to specifically help those clients and address their specific needs.
3. Find someone else that has complementary products or services to your own, and pair up together to offer your customers and even the new partner’s customers a combined deal.  This doubles your exposure and you are addressing needs your customer may have that your own company does not address.

As you can see the more information you have, the more target the effort can be.

Remember, this is a money saver!  This allows you to send out fewer pieces of mail, and get a higher return on what you send out.

What to take away from this article

• Gather information, even if you think you will never need it.
• Turn you marketing into a focused invitation to continue doing business with you.
• Partnerships to maximize your effectiveness to the customer and double or more the number of people exposed to your message.

No, really, a funny thing did happen.  I realized that not everyone understands what SEO is and why you need a professional SEO company.

Right now you might think that SEO stands for:

S“silly”

E “excuse” to

O “over charge”

Or maybe SEO means something like this:

S “someday”

E “everyone will land”

O “on my website”

Really SEO are three very important letters to your marketing efforts online that stand for “Search Engine Optimization.”

If you already have a website than you probably recognize that building the website and getting people to the website are two VERY different things.

For many of our clients, the first phone call is a desperate attempt to make their website that they spent thousands of dollars on, work for them.  They are left with a very attractive parking space on the Internet, with no traffic driving by to see that wonderful new website.

You might ask, “What is SEO?” The real question is, “How do I get more people to visit my website?” or “How does my website get found by Google <<insert Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc.>>, I can’t find my website when I do a search.”

SEO and Internet marketing is the answer to all of those questions.  So, what should you expect to see from a professional SEO company?

1. Your website should have a detailed plan in place for increasing the number of visitors.
2. Your website should have changes made to make it more appealing to the search engines.
3. Your website should have its own online marketing plan to increase visibility.
4. Your website should have a local only plan to address online marketing locally.

In short, your website should have a complete plan, intent on getting noticed.  That is what SEO is about.   In order to get the return on investment (ROI), for the investment of a creating a website, there must also be a strategic online marketing plan focused on getting the number of visitors you need.

So what’s the trick? I substitute pronouns for nouns. There it is. That’s it. oops, I’ll have to go back and edit that. Dang it, that too… uggh. Pronouns are everywhere.

Don’t remember what a pronoun is? Well, a pronoun is a substitute for a noun. If there are any English professors that can help me out here, that would be great. Some common pronouns are: it, they, them, him, her and those. They are placeholders for something that you described previously.

So how do you use it? Correction. How should you use this technique of substituting a noun for a pronoun? Do you see how I substituted ‘it’ with ‘this technique of substituting a noun for a pronoun’ ? That’s how this technique works.

So how does this noun for pronoun substitution technique work, as it applies to search engine optimizations? This SEO technique works by:

1) providing more content to your readers and search engines. Longer posts/content give search engines a clue that it is quality content – length is one factor of a good post. More content also gives your readers an indication that you have something valuable to say. Ever find a post that is two sentences long? It’s really hard to get anything out of two sentences, and you leave the site with a sour taste in your mouth and you don’t want to return. Don’t let your customers and visitors get that sour taste in their mouth about your site. Give them quality content, and length and nouns is a great way to achieve this.

and

2) by giving search engines an increase in the keyword density of the words that you are using for nouns. If this page is a well targeted page to a certain keyword set, you will do everything in your power to keep the pronoun to noun substitutions focused around a certain subset of keywords. If however, your article or blog post is a general purpose article that could garner visitors from a number of keywords, then you will be utilizing un-targeted keywords, which is still going to be found by someone somewhere. For most articles, I prefer to target a pre-defined set of keywords that I’ve researched well in advance, but I’ll take a non-targeted keyword set over a pronoun any day of the week.

So there you have it. blast! Common cliches use pronouns so often, that I find that I’m still using the cliches. Don’t go overboard with the pronoun to noun technique, only use it when it makes sense (like this sentence)

So go back through your site, and see if you can optimize your site for the search engines by making a few small tweaks to your pronouns. You won’t see immediate nor dramatic effects, but keep an eye on your web analytic stats over the next few months after you do this, and it just might surprise you on the keywords that people are finding you with.

Did you know that there are certain keywords that show cyclical trends? Do you know how to check? Google Trends. Now you do. Go check out Google Trends. and play around.

Play around? Yep! Type in something like ‘christmas open restaurant’ and look at the trend – every December there is a huge rush of traffic for that keyword. I mean, who doesn’t want to go out to eat after Christmas dinner got charred on the BBQ?

Here’s some others that might be of interest to you: holiday recipe, holiday shopping, santa clause , holiday specials

Now the playing around part comes to finding keywords that are relevant to your industry, and get the message out. How? in every email, blog, newsletter, web sales copy, or PPC ad campaigns – they should all be including the keywords that are relevant to your industry. I found ‘Christmas Marketing’ for my industry, what’s in yours?

Why not leave a comment about what you find… maybe it will spark an idea for the next reader

Two of the most important questions that arise from your intended use of SEO are, “how much are you willing to spend?”, and “are you going to outsource the SEO?”. Why are these important? For starters – they force you to commit to a plan. Without a plan there can be no action, without action you can’t win.

So do you outsource? A lot of it will depend on your budget and your goals. If you have an extremely limited budget, you might be able to hire a part time traffic assistant from another country that can do some off-page link building for you – but there is risk involved with this scenario. Often times the paid traffic generation companies use automated software, or do things that Google and other search engines aren’t really fond of. This could have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. If you can’t outsource, then you might also consider doing the SEO by yourself. The downfall is that this takes away from your business that you run, and takes time to learn and implement. SEO is an ongoing effort, and not a one-time shot, so if you start it, you better be able to finish it, or the time you spent starting the SEO effort will be wasted.

If you have a larger budget, do you hire someone outright, or do you outsource to another company, or even another country? You can hire someone outright and put her on your payroll, and might even get a good rate on pay, but what about the quality of results? In this case, you are likely to get what you pay for. SEO is a very competitive market, and if someone takes a job working for someone else in this market, they may not be motivated enough to achieve the results that you are after. There is always the exception to the rule, but they are rare in this market. If you find the right person for the right price, and they are motivated enough, you can always have them trained by a consultant to do the job in house. This is often times a good idea if proprietary systems are involved.

So if you outsource, where do you turn? Foreign countries are one option, and for many, the results will be very much in line with what they are expecting, and for the price that they are willing to pay.

Another option is to hire a local SEO consultant that can be hired part/full time to work closely with your team to optimize your site to meet or exceed your online goals. The advantage of outsourcing an SEO consultant is that he is likely more entrepreneurial in spirit, and motivated to do a great job for you – especially if there is a bonus clause in your contract. Another is that you are hiring someone that focuses all his/her attention on nothing but SEO, so the quality of your results are likely to be better by outsourcing, rather than trying to train someone in-house.

I may be biased on this SEO topic – but I wholeheartedly believe that if SEO isn’t your business, that you should outsource the work, and allow yourself to focus on the business that you are in. I also recommend that you investigate any SEO proposals that you receive – and don’t let price be a factor, look at the quality. To check if the SEO proposal is a good one, go to one of the SEO forums like Warrior Forum and ask around. They are typically very friendly and can give you an honest answer.

It’s time to take a look at those links and develop a plan to increase the relevance by building relationships.  Did you think link building is all about an email asking to exchange links?

There is another person on the other end of that link – not just another website. Go to the contact page, find the phone number, call them, and talk directly to the person running that website and let them know how you might be able to work together.

When you approach link building the same way you approach building all your business relationships you are ten steps ahead of most of your completion.

So, where do you look to put your links?

1. Complementary Services – These are places that are not in direct completion with you, share the same target market, and could be great referral partners. 
2. Industry Publication Sites – Offer to provide content for a website that specializes in giving information about your industry.  Write up an article specifically for them, and even ask them what information would complement their current offerings.
3. Forums – Finding forums that have a loyal following, active participants, and current information, is a great start to get your name out there, especially if it is all about your industry.

Link building is relationship building.  The more you spend time on developing the relationships with the sites that you want linking to you, the better quality link you will get.

Always remember the person on the other side, and they will remember you.

Now I don’t want to get caught up in the semantics of what they’re talking about… that would likely lead us off topic – but ever think about what it’s really accomplishing?

Well search engine keywords aren’t too much different… think about it… “My keyword ranks number 1 on Google, and number 3 on MSN and Yahoo… Beat that!”

This is what I call a “Keyword Trophy”. Where you get some mythical prize if you rank number one for some set of keywords. But is a keyword trophy really worth anything? Sometimes, but usually not.

Let me explain. If you had no competition, then what is the real value of a keyword ranking? There isn’t one. For instance, I bet I could create a site today and rank number one on most search engines for the keyword phrase “itchy witchy seems kinda funky but might pay me more money in the long run” – some random made up phrase that I’ll now rank for, but how many people are going to be searching for it? And more importantly, what are they going to do with it?

That’s kinda my point here… the “what are they going to do with it” part – Your goal is conversions, and new customers right? So if all your keyword trophies aren’t converting, then what is there value? Do you see where I’m going with this? Conversions and customers are the real goal of Internet marketing and search engine optimizations… not top rankings. Does this mean that you should stop trying to rank high? nope. Not at all. But focus on the important keywords… the ones that convert traffic into customers. Otherwise all those SEO consultant fees aren’t paying for themselves… just your ego and the size of your… whatever it was that was being measured.

By reading this today you have already taken the first step to Total Domination by realizing that something different will need to happen in order to make it to the top.

Our program will give you one-on-one mentoring, video tutorials, articles of hot topics, and a monthly teleconference that is guided by your questions. The mentoring is presented in forum fashion, where you can ask your Total Domination Mentors questions that are specific to your industry.

No canned answers here. No checklists with vague descriptions.

There are only answers as specific as your questions.

Getting to page one takes a lot more than just well-wishing. It takes a concerted marketing effort, just like any other business. Kettlewell Enterprises is introducing our new program called Total Domination Mentorship that gives you the online marketing know-how to do what is required to get that revered page one listing.

This is sure to spark fear into the hearts and souls of your competitors. Why?

Because they want the same thing you do. They too want to be listed number one…

Join us in our Total Domination Mentorship and you will Totally Dominate!

To succeed with our program, you should be a motivated business owner, ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work. You might even be a company web designer searching for the answers about SEO, or a marketing professional that is looking to put the punch in an online campaign.

The point is that no matter where you are in the organization, if your focus is to bring your company to the top, then it’s time to take the steps necessary to do something different from the rest.
To be better than the rest – to Totally Dominate your industry – you need the answers. You have come to the right place because we have those answers.

Learn more about dominating your industry by clicking Total Domination in the main menu

And after you’ve watched the video, go get your very own LinkedIn account.

“Charlie bit me” is a youtube video that got more than 6 million views worldwide. Because of its popularity it is has been made the subject of several spoofs which features two not so cute adults trying hard to copy the innocent, unrehearsed acts of the two kids featured in the original video.

The video has been added about 9 months ago, the exact date is May 22, 2007. To date, it has received a total of 7,764 comments and has been “favorited “43,030 times.

As of today, it has been mentioned in 106,000 website. Since google search for the video has reached a certain amount of volume, statistics for the search of the keyword “charlie bit me” has started to show in google trends. (Take note that Google trends only shows graphs when searches for a popular keyword reaches a certain volume)

So popular is the video that the phrase “Charlie bit me” itself has been used by several webmasters and several venture capitalist to make money out of. In fact the mother of the boys commented, “I have noticed that the phrase Charlie bit me is catching on and people are trying to profit of it . . .”

The parents is starting to realize that there is income to be made through utilizing the high volume of traffic that the popular youtube video and the popular keyword “Charlie bit me” has brought. In order not to be left behind by other venture capitalist, the parents are making available to the public the “Charlie bit me” t-shirt series.

The parents did the right thing considering that the video features their kids and they were the ones who uploaded the video. It should be them that should be the first to benefit from the popularity and the high volume of traffic that the video has brought.

Certainly the video is so cute and the British accent adds to its attraction. (Several “Charlie bit me” spoofs are not so cute at all; in fact I would say that they are lame)

If there is one lesson that can be learned from this “Charlie bit me phenomenon” or “Charlie bit me craze” that is that CONTENT IS STILL KING. No matter what other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus say, in the end its still “The content stupid.” Most of “Charlie bit me” fans know about the video through word of mouth. It is quite obvious that people who do not know about the video knew about this through others and not by searching for “funny videos” over the internet. I doubt if the parents of these kid did some advertisement, tried to increase their back links, released several press releases, bought some articles are bought text link or google ads. The “Charlie bit me” video has become so popular because people liked the content. In fact they go crazy over it. It’s funny and it’s cute. Of course I am not underestimating the importance of SEO strategies and techniques, however in the end, high volume sustainable traffic to your site is mainly due to rich content.

Oh by the way, if you really like the video I really recommend that you buy the shirt.

Source: increasing traffic to your site

Meta tags have 2 components to them, a name and a content section. When we are talking about meta tags, as far as SEO is concerned, we really are referring to the keyword and description meta tags. Do you see that the keyword meta tag is a common separated list of words and the description is a statement of what this page is about? Good.

Lets see what all the fuss is about.

Back in the early days of the Internet, circa 1995-1998, it was possible to rank in the number one position based solely on the values that you had in your keyword and description meta tags. But pretty soon, the search engines caught on to what was happening, and started to discount the values in the keyword and description meta tags ( just meta tags from here on out). In fact, if the search saw that you were stuffing keywords in the meta tags just for rankings, they’d reduce your rank based on that fact.

Well, fast-forward to 2008, and the meta tags are no longer the sole way to rank at the top, but are they still useful? Most critics say, Yes, use them, but use them wisely. Why? Well a few reasons. Most of it has to do with how each search engine is using the meta tags. Google mostly ignores the meta tags, except that it does seem to verify that the meta tags are corroborating the story of the rest of the page. So make sure that you have relevant information, but don’t just stuff keywords in there. The best advice is, be natural. And Yahoo and MSN use the description meta tag as the result of searches. So this is what surfers see in the search engine listings, so making sure that the description meta tag is informative is extremely important if you are going to attract those search engine surfers.

So… what’s the verdict?

I use the meta tags on every single page, and I make sure that the meta tags are unique and relevant to the information that is on that page (yes, it takes time and effort). But the effort is well worth it. Even if the difference is only a fraction of a point, if it is the difference between 1st on page 2 or last on page 1, in this case, I’ll take last place (since it really is number 1). So what should you do if your SEO consultant highlights this activity as his main course? Pass on this offer, and keep looking for an SEO consultant that has some more experience. Meta tags are a great way to squeeze an extra ounce of juice, but for the real flesh, there are other activities that can make you jump several pages of results in one motion. Check out last weeks article on SEO and title tags for the single best on page SEO technique that you can use.

So with all the buzz surrounding Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how do you know where to start? Well, as with most things, approach a large daunting task the same way that you approach eating an elephant – One bite at a time! Now, there are many different techniques, strategies, tactics, methods and approaches to SEO, so where do I start? With the title. You see, the page title gives visitors the same “impression” that a book title gives you. It’s not meant to tell the whole story – that’s what the book is for.

OK. So how does a search engine view the title? The same way as librarian. You see, a librarian is more than just a person that you ask “where’s the reference section?” – they are also the ones that are in charge of viewing the library as a collection, and knowing when something is old – as in an antique , or old – as in just plain outdated, or knowing when something needs to be added to the collection, and above all, where to get the book. So how does a librarian know how to categorize a book? Well, she’ll start with the title.

Think about this for a moment. If you have your business name as the title, where does that fit? What does she know about your business name, in relation to putting the book on the shelf? Now image that your business is “ServPro Of Grand Junction” what does it tell you about what services they provide? Wouldn’t “Cleanup and restoration services for fire, water and mold in Grand Junction” be more descriptive? A heck of a lot better right?

So now we’ve gotten you to see and believe that a business name is a lousy page title, so what makes a great page title? Well, for starters, don’t make it too long. Somewhere around 50-75 characters has worked well for me. Then you need to consider what keywords your page is targeting. This of course assumes that you’ve done some keyword research. If you haven’t, don’t fret, just make a best guess on what you think your top 3 keywords are that people would search to find you. So when you put your title together, put together as many 3, 4 & 5 word combination’s that you can think of that are relevant to your page, using targeted keywords where you can ( but don’t overdo it, unless it makes human sense). These phrases can be an item description, a category description, a description of services you provide, or any descriptive phrase about your business that makes sense.

Make sure that you are making these reviews based on this particular page that you are working on, not your entire site. So yes, this means that you need a fresh and unique page title per web page. Now that you have a few phrases put together, put 2 or 3 of them together, separated by a ‘ | ‘ or a ‘ – ‘ . Don’t make this a keyword list either. The phrases need to make sense to your visitors. Why is this so important? Because your page title is what is used as the main heading in search engine results. So this title must make sense to them for the terms that they are shopping for.

So what are some examples?

Try the popular Google search for ‘wedding favors’. Do you see the title for ‘My Wedding Favors – Unique Wedding Favors – Bridal Shower Favors’. If you look on this results page, you’ll see that they’re all fairly similar. Short descriptive phrases.

Try a Google search on ‘Dude Ranch’ and you get the results of ‘The Dude Ranchers’ Association: Over 100 of the best Dude Ranch …’ — pretty descriptive of what they are and do.

So what would a bad example look like? Well, I took the Google search for ‘Dude Ranch’ and went to page 10 or so, and found this ‘TriangleX Ranch – Moose, Wyoming’ Is it really a dude ranch? It didn’t convince me, so I didn’t click on it to find out.

And out of this bad example, did you notice something? yep! 10 bonus points to you… bad titles go on later result pages, and good titles go on the first result pages… it’s a no brainer that you’re going to need a great title to make number one!

edit: There was a slight hangup with the WP-SuperCache plugin with the expires time. Modified my httpd.conf file, and Presto! All is working. Thanks all for noticing, and letting me know that there was a problem.

We’ve also removed some of the links to other services that we offer… even though we still offer them on the side, this site is now geared for our primary business of Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

We hope that you’ll take a moment to look around, and use the contact form just to say ‘Hi’, and if you’re really bold, fill out our Free SEO quote, if you’d like to see what we can do to get you to the top.

Of course, you can always follow us on twitter. I’m usually posting small tidbits of SEO information and other uncanny conversations about the world around us.