Don’t ignore the low hanging SEO fruit!

Interleado.com runs 1000’s of reports each month and for each report our system tells users what the top 3 SEO issues with their website.

You might think that the top 3 issues would differ quite a bit from website to website.

Afterall, there are different sectors, different target countries, domains can be 10 years old or 10 days old. In my experience of looking at these reports since 2007, when they were in their embryonic stages, the consistency in the top 3 issues never fails to amaze me. The reaction from new users of the system, when they see the reports for the first time, also never fails to amaze me.

80% of the work done to optimise a website is content related – low hanging fruit. Once you have the right keywords, changing the content on your website is straight forward, either for yourself or your SEO/agency.

The fruit that is not so low hanging and much more labour intensive is building the authority of a website – that takes time and should not be looked at as a once off task, but an ongoing process that is related to the content on your website.

Ok, so granted that the top 3 issues as reported by the SEO Workbench may be tinged with subjectivity, but when will you ever get 2 people to agree about SEO. One thing is for sure, Google’s Search Engine Optimization guidelines talk a lot about content and adding the right keywords into your site’s navigation.

So, what’s the first piece of advice from Google in their SEO guideline?

Create unique, accurate page titles

What’s consistently the top SEO issue reported in the SEO Workbench?

Insert your keywords in your title tags

Coincidence?

Why is it so difficult to get keywords in the title tag?

Before we get going on what makes a good title tag, let’s just be clear about what a title tag is.

The title tag is that name or ‘tag’ you give to each individual page on your website. It is important for the following reasons:

1. Search Engines use it to help them determine how relevant a web page is for a user search query
2. Users are influenced by keywords highlighted in the title tag in the search engine results page
3. Users may also be influenced by well crafted title tags that imply a more relevant and interesting  web page

What does a title tag look like?

The title tag is found at the top of your browser, e.g. from one of the BBC ’s technology pages the title tag looks as below;

Title Tag example

What does this look like on a search engine results page, let’s say we search for ‘tech giants unite’

Title tag BBC example

You can see that the title tag listed as number 2 is our BBC example, but you can also see that the keywords I searched for ‘tech giants unite’ are all highlighted in bold.

You now know what a title tag and why it’s important – but not all title tags are created equally.

Each page on your website should have a unique title tag. For bigger e-commerce website’s, using a Content Management System that makes this easy is essential.

The title tags should include 2-3 of your keywords and should not be much more than 65 characters in length (including spaces). You won’t get penalised for having title tags longer than this by the search engines, but you may lose clicks if you have title tags longer that 65 characters and your keywords are at the end of the tag.

Remember Google cuts off title tags on it’s results pages at about 65 characters.

You can edit your title tag by opening your internet browser and clicking on ‘View’ – ‘Source (or Page Source)’

At the top of the file opened you should look for the title tag , something like this: <title>>/title>. In the middle of these tags you should have your keywords in a sentence format.

The sentence should be compelling as it will need to draw a potential visitor in. When you have changed the text, simply save the file and either send it to your web company and ask for them to upload the new file to your website, or if you have a content management system edit the title tag directly.

If you employ a web design company, you could also just send them an email and simply include your new words for each title tag you want to change. E.g. for my home page I want to change the title tag to …
(*note – keyword research should be a mandatory task before any title tags are written)

The top issue for a lot of websites is that they refuse to accept that the low hanging fruit is important.

Fix the easy stuff and progress to the more advanced SEO issues.

Back to the question, why do so many websites have difficulty getting the title tags right?

It may be a mix of issues, from getting the initial website live at any cost ( the cost is normally the content), or website owners realising there are issues but never quite getting around to fixing them.

What’s your experience as an SEO consultant or agency? What are the top issues you find on your clients websites?

As a website owner, what’s your biggest frustration with your website’s SEO?

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