Humans generally don’t really read this title tag, but search engines certainly read it.  The page titles do show up on search engine results, however, whenever your results are displayed.  With that in mind, it makes it imperative that you optimize your pages for both humans and search engines.  It needs to be a well oiled machine.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your page title tags to the best of your ability:

1. It is absolutely necessary to reflect the content of the page.

If you have a website about different types of “dog food”, and your title tag says something about “home repair”, you’re going to run into major problems.

2. Have a different title on every page of your website.

A lot of websites today make the assumption that they need to have the same page titles on every page of their website – but they couldn’t be more wrong.  You need to look at every page of your website as a new opportunity to rank for different keywords, even if they’re similar to the other title tags.

3. Use your target keywords.

The words in the beginning of your title tags have more importance than the words at the end of the title tags.  Use those keywords wisely!

4. Keywords in your title need to be separated by either | or –

This is very important to good SEO.

5. Be BRIEF.

Search engines will give more weight to a 3 work title tag than a 40 word title tag.  Be limited to about 4 keywords, and 70 characters at the absolute most.

6. Keep the human element in mind.

Remember – you want to make your website stand out from the others on the search engines.  Make sure you balance SEO with the human reaction!

7. Leave your company out of it.

99.99% of the time, you’re going to rank in the number 1 spot for your company name anyway, so leave your company name out of it.  It’s a waste of space!

One of the key components of good web copy is to make your words speak directly to your potential customer.  Stay away from being too generic.

2. Speak TO your customer.

Also, try to speak TO the customer – not AT the customer.  By making your copy personal, you’ll have a much better chance of reeling in your customers and keeping their attention on your product or service.

3. Whenever possible, use names!

People really like seeing their name.  When a person sees something with their name on it, they are far more likely to read it.  When creating your email marketing list, always ask for their name as well as their email address.

4. Write for the “average Joe.”

Your copy should be written so that an average person can easily read and understand it.  Often times, when writing your copy, people spend too much time in technical verbage and tend not to focus on specifics.  The trick is to write in a plain and straightforward manner.  Potential customers are far more likely to pay attention if they do not need to focus on comprehension.

5. Know your audience.

Knowing your audience is key to writing good web copy.  You have to first understand your reader in order to effectively communicate an idea to them.

6. Play nice.

Write in a friendly manner.  Avoid writing in the third person, which always comes across as distant and will not allow you to really connect with your customers.  You should try using first person as much as possible.

7. Keep them interested.

Keeping your customer interested in what you have to say is vital to your web copy’s success.  Grab their attention with a good headline and don’t let it go!

8. Remember the bottom line.

Always keep your objectives in mind so that you’re focused when you’re writing your copy.  Even though you are trying to be friendly and engaging, the bottom line is the bottom line.  You need to write copy so that it sells without being boring or pushy.

Good luck!

Blog to get people to go to your website!

1. Blog

That just so happens to be exactly what I’m doing now!  But, you don’t have to be a computer geek with no life (like me!) to blog – anyone can do it.  Just choose a subject that you are totally passionate about and write about it.  You don’t even have to know that much about the subject you are blogging about!

You can set up a free blog on Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start writing on a subject that relates to your business or your website.  Another way to bring traffic into your new blog is to comment on other people’s blogs and include a link back to your own blog.

2. Create Loyalty

It’s a widely known fact that retaining your existing customers is much more cost-effective than finding new customers.  This same truth applies to traffic on your website or online business. Customer loyalty programs encourage people to come back to your website or online store.  Reward repeat customers with discounts, gifts, coupons, or other incentives – and always keep track of the success of each program!  By creating an emotional attachment between your customer and your online product/service, you will become a brand to them.

3. Get the Word Out!

Most new businesses share the news of their new online business venture more than the early Christians shared the gospel of Christ!  Verbally sharing (more about verbal sharing in point 5) it is great – and often helpful – but let’s learn to take this sharing a step further.  Free and low cost news release and press release distribution agencies (like PRWeb.com) can help you spread the word about your online business or new website.

There are free agencies that do somewhat of the same thing – such as i-Newswire.com, and TheFreeLibrary.com all distribute press releases as well.

4. Know Your Stuff

One of the major benefits of moving (or even just advertising) your business online is the ability to track your data.  You can track orders, most frequent shipping locations, most common age, sex, race, and all sort of other helpful information.  Tracking (and using) this information increase the conversion rate of your website by up to 50%.  Find out the core demographic group that is using your website, and market to them!

5. Speak Up!

Speak at whatever venue you can score an invitation to!  Local business association meetings, chambers of commerce, national trade events, or local colleges are all great venues to contact.  Having a physical location can sometimes be a benefit – you can invite local businesses to come participate in a speaking event that you host.

6.  E-Mail Marketing

In the future, I will be posting quite a bit about email marketing – I firmly believe that email marketing is a brilliant way to get new people to visit your website.  This is low cost and extremely effective.  The idea of email marketing is to offer something for free to a potential customer (something digital that they are able to download instantly) in exchange for their email.  You then send them weekly or bi-weekly emails with useful information in their email.

The idea is that you build yourself a marketing list in which you can advertise your products and services.  You don’t want to just sent them an email with an advertisement in it, but you want to send them something useful – tips or tricks that relate to your industry, or latest industry events.  Whatever it is, you now have a list of people whom you know are already interested in your products and services.

7. Become An Industry Expert

This is extremely valuable for your online presence.  Join forums, write blog posts, join social networking websites – do anything and everything in your power to meet other people who have questions that you are able to answer.  For instance, when I was building a church directory in Scotland, I was joining every Christian forum that I could and offering advice, suggestions, and relevant conversation.  My signature contained the URL to my web directory, and I was able to drive quite a bit of traffic to my website.

8.  Post A Video

I simply cannot stress the power of video.  The video that I show below is just a very light-hearted example of a marketing video.  The idea for this video was to get people to think that this video is funny enough to send to their friends, and at the same time I would get free marketing with it.

Another great way to drive traffic to your website or online store is to create a “how-to” article on a topic in your industry and then post it to free websites like YouTube.com or Google Video.  For instance, I will be creating “do it yourself” videos on YouTube.com in the future and posting them on YouTube.  This is an extremely effective way to drive traffic straight to your website, and also to identify yourself as an expert.

9. Websites, websites websites!

Websites like Digg.com and Yelp.com are both great ways to show off your new online venture.  Yelp.com is extremely effective – especially if you’re doing business locally!  Yelp is a website in which you sign up and post reviews about different businesses you’ve visited in the area.  If someone has a great transaction with you, it would greatly benefit your business if they were to write a review on your business on Yelp.com.

Digg.com is an extremely powerful traffic-generating website.  Users to Digg.com sign up and post interesting articles on Digg.com which then drive traffic to your website article.  Make sure to use this often with your blog!  As posted on their website, “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.”

10. Joint Venture

This is huge!  Pair up with another company that offers products and services that benefit your online business.  In this area, the more you give, the more you receive.  It’s not enough just to announce your business – meet local business owners who share the same passions that you do and offer to market them to your customers in exchange for them marketing to theirs!

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