Recently I have been getting a lot of questions from friends that own their own businesses. The questions tend to circle around the idea of getting more traffic to their business websites. While I can’t guarantee traffic I can give you some pointers on how to optimize your site for better Search Engine results. So I am challenging myself to write a blog post every day of this week on how to increase your traffic.
One of the difficult things about optimizing a site for Mobile Alabama is that the name of our city has double meeting. Basically there are numerous ways of using the word mobile, you can get a mobile phone, you can look at mobile websites, you can live in a mobile home, or you can visit and do business in Mobile. Unfortunately capitalizations don’t make a difference when doing a search on Google. Try it. You can search for mobile or Mobile and still get the same results.
So what is one to do? Introducing Title Tags...
To start you can pay attention to your Title Tag (technically called a Title Element). The Title Tag dictates what shows up in your browser chrome when you visit a site. For instance:
Notice that all you see is "Blue Fish Design Studio" when you visit our site. But if you use your mouse to hover over the tab you’ll see the full title: Blue Fish Design Studio - ExpressionEngine, Web Design, Mobile Websites - Mobile, Alabama. In Google's eyes, the Title Tag is the second most important on-page Search Engine Optimization element. The first is content (more on that in another article). Google uses the Title Tags to make an initial judgement about the content and what it is about.
Make sure that all of your Title Tags contain keywords that you want to show up in searches for. And definitely make sure that if you want to appear in searches for Mobile that you use Mobile, AL or Mobile, Alabama.
Title Tags are limited to 70 characters. The good news is that you can have different Title Tags on every page. So, if you have a blog, each of the articles on your blog can have a different Title. This means that every additional article that you write gives you more opportunity to show up in search results. So if you have been putting off writing on your blog perhaps now you’ll understand why that is important.
We’ll be writing a post about content for tomorrow. It will share ways that you can get past writers block. We’ll also discuss the importance of updating content on your site. So check back!