A Human Friendly Guide to Search Engine Friendly Titles
Posted on May 9, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing |
I was checking out the websites of some businesses within my industry and was not particularly shocked to see a widespread lack of search engine friendliness.
- Site built entirely out of flash and/or images,
- No concept of Keyword Selection,
- Internal navigation handled entirely by Javascript,
- In some of the more hilarious examples, I found sites still stuffing their pages with invisible text ripped verbatim from other websites,
- As a curious aside, I noticed a correlation where sites that had annoying, redundant splash pages where more likely to employ frames.
All of these factors will limit Google’s ability (or willingness) to crawl the pages on your site and classify your content within their index. There’s one element in particular I found that needs attention paid to it.
You don’t have to look far to see if your site is missing a vital ingredient.
Take a look at the Title of your homepage…
Now take a look at the Title of some of your other pages… Notice anything different? If you answered “no” to this question then you really need to keep reading!
I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a human friendly analogy for search engine friendly title tags.
Let’s say you’re the manager of a football “team” (website) playing in the “Widget League” (keyword niche) and you have eleven “players” (pages) on your “team”.
For whatever reason, a customer is looking for a Goal Keeper in the Widget League. They type “Widget Goal Keeper” or “Goal Keeper Widget” into Google. Google will then look through it’s index and identify all the teams playing in the Widget League with a Goal Keeper in their ranks. Google will make a decision (based on a range of factors) which player it thinks is the most relevant to the query and will serve them up as the first result. Bear in mind that there will usually be other teams in the same league competing with you and they will probably have a Goal Keeper. You want your Goal Keeper to be found before any other team’s Goal Keeper.
When you use the same keywords in the title tag on every page on your site you make it difficult for Google and the other search engines to decide which page is most relevant for those keywords. Each page on your site is effectively competing with every other page on your site.
Now, imagine playing a game of football (soccer) with eleven Goal Keepers on your team. You’d get your butt kicked!!
There’s at least two things wrong with fielding a team full of Goal Keepers:
- Google has to make up it’s own mind as to which player is your No.1 Goal Keeper, and;
- You’ve got no Defenders, Attackers or Midfielders… what happens when a customer wants something other than a Goal Keeper? Google will skip right past you and throw the ball to a competitor.
Please enjoy my visual representation of poorly optimised title tags;
Poorly Optimised Title Tags
No professional football team is going to field eleven Goal Keepers at the same time. You’ll find they know better than this and will field a well balanced team composed of specialist players who know their position on the field better than any of their team mates and competitors.
Now take a look at my visual interpretation of good seo title tag optimisation;
Good SEO Title Tag Optimisation
Now Google knows who your dedicated Goal Keeper is. This is no guarantee that you’ll rank first for “Widget Goal Keeper” because there might be teams out there with a bigger salary cap or a better coach. Google also knows you’ve got a Left Centre Forward, a Right Fullback, a Left Wing… you get the idea.
Read this article at SEOMoz for a less confusing discussion of this concept. You could also google for seomoz keyword cannibalization and it would be first result but at the time of writing you won’t find it if you mispell that query and type seomoz keyword cannibilization instead.
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Just for the sake of it, let’s call this team the “Widget Wanderers”