How to look for search engine optimisation red flags in your website setup.
As a Redcliffe region business owner you should check your websites periodically against ‘best practices’ just as you would review any other marketing material. In the video below I’ll show you how to check part of the background setup of your website, the Title Tag, to see if it has been completed correctly. If you find that this has been done poorly then its a good indicator that the rest of your website has not been setup correctly to be found in search engine results.
While this is applicable to search engines in general, for this post I am mainly referencing Google due to its dominance in the Australian context. Google works for the most part on ‘relevance’, seeking to return the most relevant websites that match your search query. To determine the relevance of your website the Google robots will crawl your website at different intervals looking for information. One of the things that will help Google relate your website to the search query is the ‘Title’ tag. Watch the video to see how to look for your page’s title tag.
What is a Title Tag?
The title tag is part of the background code of your website pages. The text in the title tag should bear some relationship to the search queries that you want to be found for. In search engine optimisation(SEO) parlance this is called your keywords. If you just have ‘Home’ or ‘Welcome’ in your title tag it does not provide any information on what your page is about. Google is then missing part of the information that it uses to try to determine your page’s relevance and to position your company website in relation to competitors in the search results.
Where possible you should include several keywords in your title with the most important appearing towards the front of the title. If your company name is not a large brand and your company name doesn’t itself include your keywords then place it at the end of the title.
The other useful thing that the title tag does is determine the text that is displayed in the search results for your website listing. The text you use can have an influence on the click through rate of people visiting your site. If you are in position 2 in the Google results but have a compelling offer in your title description then you may get as many clicks if not more than position one. For this reason your title tag text should still appeal to the human visitor and not just be a pile of keywords targeting the search engine robots. Its a balance though as its no good having a beautifully worded title if your website is deep in the search results and no-one sees it.
Title Tag Length
Only the first 70 characters are displayed in Google so try to make your title readable at that length. Make sure your spelling is correct too – almost nothing is going to reduce your click through rate more than poor spelling in your title as it gives a bad impression before the visitor even sees your page.
Website Title Tags Example
Website Designers should take care of this?
Paying a high cost for your website doesn’t necessarily ensure that you will get a website that works from a search engine optimisation point of view. Website design and online marketing/SEO are not the same field of expertise. Many web designers are now picking up SEO skills and including on-page optimisation as a feature or add-on option which is great to see.
However it is not necessarily included and there are plenty of expensive and amazingly beautiful websites out there that are not optimised because the designer was exactly that, a designer and not an internet marketer. For most small to medium businesses the ROI of a website will come from being found in the first place rather than the ability to ‘wow’ the visitor from a design standpoint.
Action Step
Follow the steps in the video and check your own business website to see if your Title tag has been completed correctly and includes at least some of the keywords you think that potential customers might be using in search queries to find you. Check for spelling mistakes at the same time.
If you would like a second opinion on your Title tags then leave a comment below this post.