How to choose the right web page title

The title of a web page is one of the most important elements. Good web page titles can remarkably increase the effectiveness of your web site.

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tag in the HTML code of a web page. If you write the right text between these tags, your web site can get more targeted visitors.

Why are web page titles so important for your web site success?

The titles of your web pages are important for search engines

To many search engine spiders the title of a web page is more important than other web page elements. If your web page title contains your most important keywords, it's likely that the web page will have a good search engine ranking for these keywords.


The titles of your web pages are important for web surfers

The title of your web site is the first thing web surfers will see from your web site. Many search engines display the title of a web page as the main link to a web site in the search engine result pages.

In addition, the web page title is used when a web surfers bookmarks your web site.
While most search engines don't allow you to influence the description of your web site, the title of your web site is often listed without any changes.

What does this mean to you?

It's important that your web pages have compelling titles that are compelling to web surfers and that contain your most important keywords.

For example, if you have a sports shoe shop in London, don't use this title tag:

Welcome to Smith & Son
People probably won't click on that link because they don't know who you are. That web page title doesn't look very attractive to the average surfer. Better use this title:

Buy sneakers and sports shoes at competitive prices in our shop in London. Nike, Adidas, Reebok and all other major sports shoe brands.
Why is the second title better than the first one?

The second title has many advantages over the first title.

The second title contains keywords that are important for a sports shoe business: sports shoes, sports shoe, sneakers and several brand names.

The inclusion of these words in the title increase the change of good search engine rankings for these keywords.


The second title informs web surfers about the purpose of the web site and it gives them a reason to click: Buy sneakers and sports shoes at competitive prices.


The second title includes geographical information: ...in our shop in London. People who live in Chicago are probably not interested in a shop that's based in London.

The inclusion of "London" in the web page title allows people to quickly find out if it's worth to visit the web site. In addition, it's more likely that the web site will be found for a search term such as "shoe shop London".


Good web page titles can help you to increase your search engine rankings and to get more people to click on your link.

How often should you submit your web site?

You've probably seen them on the web and you've probably received many spam email messages from them: services that promise you to submit your web site to thousands of search engines and that tell you that your web site will get high search engine rankings if you just submit your web site often enough.

The frequency of your search engine submission is not important

When you submit your web site URL to a search engines, you basically ask the search engine spiders to visit your web site and to evaluate it. If the search engine spiders cannot find anything useful on your site, they won't list your web site. It doesn't make sense to submit your web site again and again if it isn't search engine ready.

Search engines must be able to find out what your web site is all about. They need to find text and links on your web pages and they also need to find the keywords for which you want to have high rankings on your web pages.

Submitting alone doesn't guarantee visitors

Submitting your web site to search engines is important, but it is not the most important step in your search engine marketing campaign.

It's much more important that your web pages are optimized for search engines. Many web sites are designed in a way that prevents them from showing up in search engines.

If your web pages are not search engine ready, it's pointless to submit them. If the search engines index your web site at all, it will be listed on position 17,352 or worse. With a listing on that position, you won't get any visitors.

The key to successful search engine submission

Before submitting your web pages to search engines, you must make sure that they are optimized for your important keywords and for the special search engine you target.

If your web pages are prepared for a special search engine and for a special keyword then it's much more likely that your web site will receive high rankings.

Make sure that your web pages contain enough text and that search engine spiders can find the pages of your web site trough normal text links. Don't use web site intros and don't use too many Flash elements on your web site. It is extra work to optimize your web pages for search engines but it is well worth the effort.

Professional search engine submission takes some time

Don't fall for services that promise you to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. It will only result in thousands of spam messages. Invest some time in optimizing your web pages before you submit them and then submit your site to important search engines. You'll get much better search engine rankings

IBP helps you to optimize your web pages for high rankings on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines and it also helps you to submit your web site to all important search engines. Use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to optimize your pages before you submit them.

Can SEO companies guarantee rankings?

Some SEO (search engine optimization) companies guarantee that you get a special search engine position if you let them do the work for you. Actually, this is not possible. No company can guarantee search engine listings.

If a company makes such promises, take a closer look at the guarantee. The catch is often that the company selects the search terms. You'll be listed for obscure search terms that nobody searches for. If you have a unique company name or a unique product name, it's relatively easy to get high search engine rankings for that term.

Before paying a company to get high search engine rankings for you, try it yourself with IBP. You'll find out that you can get high search engine rankings for yourself.

The only way to get high search engine rankings and staying there is good web page content and playing by the rules.

Frames and search engines

It's very difficult to get a good rankings on search engines if your web site uses frames.

The problem is that search engines do not index framed web sites well. Actually, the search engines do such a poor job of indexing frames that we recommend rebuilding your web site without them. For some search engines, rebuilding your site without frames is the only way to get a good ranking.

If you must use frames on your Web site for some reason, make sure you use the NoFrames tag so that search engines can find some text to index. The NoFrames tag is a tag specifically for search engines that cannot read the actual pages in your frame set.

Some search engines will be able to index the text you enter in the NoFrames tag. The contents you enter there should be text that is related to your site. It should contain your most important keyword phrases, but should remain readable to your Web site visitors.

You should place the NoFrames tag just before the tag in your frameset, for example:

<frameset cols="25%,*" border="1"> <frame src="this.html" name="this"> <frameset rows="*,5*"> <frame src="that.html" name="that"> <frame src="whatever.html" name="whatever"> </frameset> <noframes> <body> <h1>All about fishing equipment</h1> If you're looking for fishing equipment, you'll find it here. We offer rods, reels, lines, flies, waders, vests and apparel, tubes and boats and more. <p><a href="this.html">More about fishing equipment</a> </body> </noframes> </frameset>

An easy way to do this is to create a new not framed web page for your site that describes your products and services. Often the content can be taken directly from one of your existing framed pages.

Once you've created the new page, view the HTML source of the page and copy everything from within the and tags. Then paste the new content within the and tags found within the NoFrames tags of your frameset.

Note that the text between NoFrames tags in our example contains a link to the main frame set page. That way, Web surfers with older browsers that don't support frames will also be able to visit the page.

Don't use a list of keywords within the NoFrames tags and don't try to overuse this tag because the search engines might penalize your web site for that.

Even if you use the NoFrames tag, it's still difficult to get a good ranking for a web site that uses frames.

If at all possible, avoid frames on your site.

Filter words and stop words

Google and other big search engines ignore common words such as 'the', 'of', 'where', as well as certain single digits and single letters. These words are called "filter words". They are ignored because they tend to slow down a search without improving the results.

Of course, every search engine has its own list of filter words. We've found out that the following words seem to be ignored by most search engines:

a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, i, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with

What does this mean to your site?

Search engines consider keywords in the title, in the body text and in link texts of a web page as an important ranking criteria.

Be careful when you choose your keywords for the title and the rest of your web page. If your web page title contains a list of filter words you won't get any results. You might also dilute the effectiveness of your other keywords if you include too many filter words in the title.

Many search engines recommend limiting the number of letters in the title and in the meta tags. If your web page title or the meta tags contain too many filter words, you might reach the character limit before your important keywords begin.

Some words can get you banned on search engines

While filter words might dilute the effectiveness of your other keywords, some words might get your web page banned on search engines. These words are called stop words.

Adult words and phrases that contain sexual content are the most common stop words. However, some search engines build custom stop word lists to penalize web sites that use "keyword stuffing". Some sites use the same keyword over and over on their pages to get a high rank for that keyword on search engines, even if it is not related to their content.

Of course, search engines try to find those sites and they penalize web pages that use keyword stuffing. Unfortunately, some sites are penalized although their webmasters didn't try to spam the search engines just because they use a keyword too many times.

That's why keyword analysis and the right keyword density is very important for a successful web site. If the keyword density is too low, you won't get a good ranking, if it's too high, your site might get accused of keyword stuffing.

Summary

1. Use your most important keywords at the beginning of the title, meta tags, link texts and body text.
   
   
2. Avoid using filter words to increase the effectiveness of your keywords.
   
   
3. Make sure that your web pages have the right keyword density and don't contain stop words.

The right keyword mix on your web pages will help you to improve your ranking on all important search engines. To find the perfect keyword density for your web site, use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.

Ethical search engine optimization

Some search engine optimization companies and software developers use unethical tricks and techniques to artificially boost the search engine rankings of a web site. This dilutes the quality of search results and the accuracy of search results becomes questionable.

For this reason, the search engines are continuously trying to trace out the spam techniques which webmasters might be using and penalize or ban them.

They continue to reconstruct their algorithms to prevent spammers from flooding the results page with irrelevant or low quality content.

If you use a web site promotion tool that uses these unethical tricks and techniques, you'll put your web business at severe risk.

Axandra tools use only ethical SEO methods.

Our products use only ethical search engine optimization methods. They use only techniques that produce lasting results and that don't offend search engines.

Search engines consider the following search engine optimization techniques as SPAM. For that reason, Axandra products DO NOT use or promote them:

• automatically generated doorway pages
• cloaking and false redirects
• keyword stuffing
• hidden text or hidden links
• pages loaded with irrelevant words
• duplicated content on multiple pages
• misspelling of well-known web sites
• unrelated and centralized link farms
• other methods that try to trick search engines

You might get short term results with these techniques but it's very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you use one of these techniques. You'll put your web business at severe risk if you use one of these methods.

Axandra web site promotion tools use only ethical search engine optimization techniques that produce lasting results.

Ethical search engine optimization is about everyone winning

Ethical search engine optimization leads to a symbiotic relationship:

• Search engines: They win as they are provided with pages that are easy to understand and that contain the quality information that their visitors search for.
  
  
• Searchers: They win as they are getting what they ask for from the search engines. They search for "green widgets" and get a page about green widgets.
  
  
• Web site owners: They win as they are getting quality visitors who are interested in what their web site has to offer.