SEO Tips for Title Tags

The title tag is one of the most important tags on a web page for on-page optimization. It is also the first thing that appears within the search results on which the site visitors click to go to the site. Simple SEO stuff like the title tag can make a great difference to how well a site does in the search results. However, many website owners are not even aware about the HTML title tag; they confuse it with the big bold text on the page. Here are some important SEO tips for writing title tags.

1. Title lengths should be limited to 65 characters including the spaces.
2. Use your keyword phrases in the title tag, taking care that the title looks natural and does not appear keyword stuffed.
3. If you wish to use your site name for branding, use your brand or site name at the end of the title tag on every page of your site.
4. Each page of your site should have a unique, descriptive title tag which should match with your page content. It also makes sense to reuse the text in title tag of each page in H1 header tag too – from the viewpoint of on-page optimization as well as for enhancing user experience.
5. Shorter page titles are usually better than long ones. However, longer titles make sense when you don’t want to lose traffic from long tail keywords. You may also combine or overlap many keyword phrases in the page title. For example, a title such as ‘Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Tips’ can help you to rank for keyword phrases such as ‘Search Engine Marketing’, ‘Search Engine Optimization Tips’, etc.
6. A compelling title can attract more eyeballs and clicks when your page appears in search results. You should therefore focus on the art of writing headlines and titles for improving your conversion rate.

Outbound links and Search Engine Rankings

Many webmasters give importance to inbound links, but are reluctant to link out to other sites – trying to hoard the pagerank. However, many search engines including Google grade your pages based on the sites you link to, apart from the content and inbound links.

Linking out if done properly can improve your ranking in many search engines. If you link out to other related sites, search engines may start perceiving your site as an authority site in your niche. When you link out to other sites – especially blogs, the other bloggers may reciprocate by linking back to content on your site. Also, if you provide good information to your site visitors through outbound links, it will enhance the usability and user experience; and you may end up in getting valuable referrals and citations to your site from these users. Thus, outbound links to other related sites can boost your search engine rankings.

You should, however, be careful of who you link to. Bad outbound links can drastically affect your website authority and rankings. The ideal rule to follow is – Do not link to any site which you would not like to associate with. If your site has many random links which are not related to your niche, search engines may start perceiving your site as a link farm or spam site. Some search engines may penalize your site by scoring it low on the perceived authority. Your outbound links may lose their value and may not be able to pass any pagerank juice to the linked sites.

What is Quality Content for Search Engines?

We often hear the SEO advice that ‘Content is the King’, and search engines like Google favor good quality content. Many people confuse it with creating more pages, and they often end up in buying software like spam site generators, automated content generators and scrapping tools. Many others buy cheap articles and stuff their websites with copies of the articles. However, search engines are not lookinig for such useless garbage which hardly offers any value to the site visitors.

Quality content in short is link-worthy content which is original, conceptually unique and serves as a useful resource for information. And, it refers to the text part of your website. Though keywords matter in your page copy, your page should not look like a keyword stuffed page for search engine robots; you should write for your site visitors focusing on readability and usefulness.

Good quality content has other rewards, too. If people find your content useful and spreading information, they will naturally want to link to your site, and give referrals. Thus, useful pages meant for people can attract links which are very valuable for your ranking in the search engines.

If your pages are copies of pages on other sites, search engines like Google will perceive your site to be of poor quality offering no value. You should therefore create content which people will find useful in your niche. It is better to have few pages with quality content than having thousands of pages filled with garbage. Good content will attract referrals and citations to your site and boost your ranking naturally.

SEO Techniques for high rankings in Yahoo

Recent Search Engine share as published by comScore puts Google at 43.7% followed by Yahoo at 28.8% and MSN at 12.8%. And in some countries like Japan, Google is still at # 10 position, the top position being enjoyed by Yahoo.  Though most SEOs or website owners concentrate primarily on optimizing their sites for Google, we can not just afford to lose valuable traffic from Yahoo and MSN.  By committing some time and efforts on Yahoo optimization, it is quite possible to gain a good amount of traffic.

One of the open secrets for getting high rankings in Yahoo is to get listed in Yahoo directory. But the cost of $299 to $600 per year may be too high for many of us; besides there is no guarantee that Yahoo will include your site in their directory even after you make the payment.

Well, all search engines have their own algorithms to determine the search results and ranking the websites. Like Google, Yahoo too judges content to be the most important factor in their algorithms. Yahoo also places a lot of importance on keyword density; though Google prefers a keyword density of around 2 %, Yahoo favors sites with keyword density of 7 to 8%. Yahoo also gives importance to the description tags which most Google centered SEOs tend to neglect.

I recommend a good article which I came across on SEO for Yahoo which discusses many such SEO techniques for optimizing your site for Yahoo.