|
| Recent
Articles |
Usability Reviews Verify Good Work
While on a plane heading home from a conference I happened to meet the mother of a Human Factors employee for a well-known global Internet software company. As we chatted, she noted that when I...
SEO Copywriting
In day-to-day life, a person needn’t be Shakespeare to get his (or her) point across in writing. As a matter of fact, it’s probably easier if a person isn’t Shakespeare. But when writing for search engines, communication...
Readers Want The Full RSS Monty
We can all agree, I think, that for things we like, full is better than partial. This goes for nudity, chocolate donuts, and cleanliness. But we're really talking...
SEO Learning Life-cycle
I think the idea of breaking SEO down to the white hat and black hat camps really misses where the real divisions are. I believe that the biggest...
Indicating Web Page Expiration
I have been building a set of Web pages for events hosted by my local temple, and the Rabbi is complaining that when he uses Google to search for upcoming events, it's the older events that have already passed...
10 Rules To Ensure Usability
Everyone has their own way. I've been around many development environments and witnessed or experienced the blood, sweat and tears borne by the...
|
|
10.01.07
Titles Should Be Used In Web Design For SEO
 By
Dustin Brewer
As we have all heard, titles are a very important part of anything. Especially when it comes to designing web sites, the title says it all.
The title element is how your site is understood by your visitor and also by search robots. In the past people would stuff their titles with as many keywords as they could think of to ensure that search engines would pick up the keywords and they would rank higher. That really isn't the point and so search robots ever since have given less importance to titles.
Don't give up on titles yet!
Don't get me wrong here, titles are still a very important part of SEO and should never be ignored or disregarded.
The best thing to do is to say exactly what is on the page, this is going to tell the visitors and search robots exactly what is going on and what they should expect to find on the page. You don't want it to be off topic. Include only pertinent keywords in the titles for the specific page that is being requested. A simple sentence will typically suffice.
For example, on my article titles I will have the name of the article come first and then my name. The reason I do this is because that is what the page is about. It seems obvious, I know. But take a look around at some web sites and you will notice that some people will go pretty far to keyword stuff their page titles hoping that search engines will rank them higher because of it. However, as we all know we aren't making web sites so search engines are browsing them. We are making web sites so people can browse our sites and hopefully come back again because we did something right.
Web sites for people? What about SEO?
The most effective use of titles for SEO purposes is without a doubt your ability to catch the users attention in the SERPs. What I mean by this is that when you are searching for a site, you aren't looking to see which page has the most relevant keywords to your search. You are looking for the site with the most specific titles to your search. You are looking for a title that makes sense based on what you searched. I assure you that you are going to pick "Web design best practices for beginning designers" over "WEB DESIGN XHTML CSS SEO TRAMPOLENE DEVELOPMENT PHOTOSHOP DREAMWEAVER BILL GATES," and you know how I know this? Because we have been conditioned to avoid spam and ugly titles.
It's not all about getting to #1 for your keyword phrase. It's about getting that visitor to click on your link so your result creates traffic. I'm pretty sure that is the reason we have a web site, to generate traffic for it. Whether it be for sales or for readership, we aren't building sites to get #1. We are building sites to get people to come to our site and click on our link in the results pages. We are building web sites for people to visit them.
It's all so simple, just make your web sites geared towards getting people to visit them and the search engines will take care of the rest. Relevance is key in generating traffic.
Comments
About
the Author:
Dustin Brewer is a web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK specializing in aesthetics in design, web standards, accessibility and usability. He also enjoys helping others to discover CSS and web design best practices through his web site, dustin brewer, a web design news site.
|
