Search Engine Optimization SEO

As a Website Development and Internet Marketing Company, a major focus of ours when developing our client's websites is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the website's web pages. The first and foremost important thing for SEO is your website's Title Tags.

If a website does not have Title Tags that properly define its pages then it will be extremely difficult to receive a good ranking in the search engines. There are many reasons why Title Tags are so important - the following will define Title Tags and outline the importance of their use for Search Engine Optimization.

What is a Title Tag?

A Title Tag is a small piece of code that goes into the header of every web page. If you're familiar with the code of your pages, then the Title Tag are the words between the sections. Whatever is entered here will display on the top of the browser window when a user is viewing that page. This helps to let your viewers know what that page is all about.

A Title Tag is also utilized by the search engine. The search engine will take these words and use it when indexing the page in their search directory. These words will act as a hyperlink in the search results and will link the user to that particular page of the website.

If you do a search in Google for Professional Website Development what do you see? You see a listing of millions of pages all about "Professional Website Development". In the search results you will notice that the top listings all have those words highlighted and if you click the link you will be directed to that company's web page.

What is the Importance of Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization?

Because the search engines use the Title Tag to list the page in their search engine, this is what they use to understand the content that's on that page. If you have descriptive Title Tags for your various pages then you will have a better chance than if you just had generic Titles listed because you will be giving the search engines the topics for your various pages.

Let's take an example:

Let's say your homepage had a Title Tag like the following: . What benefit does that have for SEO? Absolutely none! No person will ever search for "Welcome to our Website" in the search engines because it is way too generic.

To the search engine this is invaluable information and would not help define what your company or that web page is all about.

How do you fix this?

It's really not that complicated. For example purposes, let's say your company is an Internet Marketing Company. Let's update our Title Tag to say . Now this has value! To the search engine this truly defines what your company is all about and what content is on your web page. If someone now does a search for "Internet Marketing and SEO Company" you have a better chance of being displayed in the search engine for that search.

One thing to remember is that when you are updating your Title Tags, it's important to update the Title Tag for every single website to ensure that they all relate to that content that's on that particular page. If all of your web page's Title Tags are the same, then the search engines will basically see this as one page. But if you have different Title Tags for every page, then the search engines will index your pages accordingly.

What are the next steps?

Here's what I recommend. I recommend first to define the various keywords and phrases that are important to your business. This will help you determine the keywords that should be listed in your Title Tags. After outlining your keywords, now spend the time going through the pages of your website and update the Title Tags for every page. When doing this, pay close attention to the content that's on that page. Make sure that the Title Tags properly reflex the page content. You do not want to improperly use keywords and phrases that do not correctly reflect the page content... this will not do you any good!

When doing this, ensure that the keywords you use in your Title Tags are also used in the content of that page. As you're going through, you may also want to update your page content to make sure you're properly using the keywords and phrases that you've outlined above. If you're updating your content during this process, this is a great sign. Updating your content to reflect your main keywords and Title Tags is one step closer to having a website that is properly optimized for the search engines.

Monitor your results

After doing this for every page of your website, it's now time to monitor your results and see if the changes you've made are successful. Give it some time because it takes some time for your pages to be indexed in the various search engines. There are ways to speed up the indexing process to a matter of days using an automated sitemap submission but if you do not use one of these methods then you must allow at least 2 months for the new content to become indexed.

Also check and monitor your website statistics. Check the traffic and monitor the keyword search terms that are now being searched. Are you noticing the new terms that you've updated in your Title Tags and content being searched? If so great! If not, then you need to re-evaluate your terms and make sure you're using terms that users looking for your type of company will type into the search engines.

If you effectively apply these steps to your Title Tags then I'm confident you will start to see an improvement in website traffic. This is just the tip of the iceberg for SEO but it's one of the first and most important things to do to optimize your web pages and let the search engines know what you're pages are all about.

At Hudson Horizons, we offer automated submission of your Sitemaps to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

Click to automate your Sitemap submissions.

Hudson Horizons http://www.hudsonhorizons.com is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses.

Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be "The New Light for e-Business."

By offering new, innovative and extremely competitive products and solutions to our clients, we provide better ways to run and operate their business online.