One SEO Tweak That Can Help Grow Your Business
I recently had lunch with an old friend who works for a family owned furniture rental company. She told me that she just implemented a new automated payment system on their website. I asked her who she used to do the work. She told me she used a small company in Ohio (she’s in New Jersey). I asked how she found them. She said that she Googled something like, “automated payment system for furniture rental companies” and bingo!
Besides illustrating the power of search and the impact it can have on your business, there’s a huge lesson to be learned from this story that can help you grow your business with just a tiny tweak to your website code.
One of the primary elements that Google uses to determine what search results to display is your website’s title. The title of your page is the linked text that you see in organic search results.
If you hover your mouse pointer over the page tab of any webpage in your browser, you should see the title appear. The page title is one of the primary things that search engines use to determine what your page is about. It is therefore a very valuable piece of SEO real estate.
Many companies waste that valuable SEO real estate by either putting their company name in the title or something like “home” or “welcome to xyz company”. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have your company name in the title tag (as long as it isn’t too long”. But more importantly, your title tag should contain the keywords you are targeting.
Let’s assume that the name of the furniture rental solution provider is ABC Solutions. If they used their name in their title tag, it’s far less likely that they would appear in a search for “furniture rental payment systems”, unless the searcher also included their name in their search.
What they should have in their title tag is a phrase that describes what they do and includes the keywords that potential customers will be using to search for them with. In all likelihood ABC Solutions had something like “furniture rental payment systems” in their title tag, which is probably very similar to what my friend typed into the Google search box.
Every webpage and blog post on your website should have a unique title tag that represents the content of your page.
Before you create a new title you need to do some keyword research to determine the keywords and phrases that your potential customers are using to search for your product and service. Once you’ve got your keywords, you can start creating titles from them.
How to you change your title tag?
If you’re using WordPress for your website, then the easiest way to optimize your title tags and the rest of your seo is by using the FREE Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. You can download it from their website or from the wordpress plugin bank directly from your website. Once installed and activated (which takes about 30 seconds) it will display a field on every page and post where you can insert your unique title (and description). That’s it, your done!
If you need to manually modify your website code (which is HTML) you’ll find the title tag in the <head> section at the top of your web page code in between the title tags – <title> Insert Your Title </title>.
Here’s a screen shot of my website code (line #7):
Most website building programs give you the ability to easily modify your title tags. just remember to modify your titles on every page.
You can have about 55 characters in your title tag, so you could add more keywords or even your company name or brand. But make sure to include your keywords in your title tag.
Also keep in mind that your title tag does not have to be the same as the actual title of your page or post that readers see.
You can read more about title tags in this article.
Bottom line
The first thing I do when evaluating a website is to hover over the page tab in my browser to see what the title is. In most cases it’s either something like “home” or “about” (which means that they haven’t touched their SEO) or the name of their business, which is a huge waste of SEO opportunity that’s costing them search visibility and customers.
If you want your website to show up when potential customers are searching for your product and service in Google (or any other search engine), take a moment to create unique title tags that include your keyword phrases. Overtime (and sometimes even within days) you’ll begin to see more visitors to your website coming via search. That means more business for you.
