Like any advertising campaign, it's important to understand your target audience and know how you are most likely to be found in a search.  For example, if your company is "Knutson Pools Inc." and your target audience is pool and spa shoppers in Naperville and Chicago, your title tag should be more than just "Knutson Pools, Inc."  Ideally, your page should show up in searches such as "Naperville Pools" and "Chicago Spas"

One way to construct your title tag would be:

Knutson Pools – Chicago Pool and Spa Store – Naperville, Illinois

Notice that this phrase title includes some key elements: company name, target audience, and specific city location.  This type of phrase has a greater chance of ranking highly among many phrases due to the variety of important keywords contained that describe the store.  If your store is a dealer for specific brands or trade names that have recognition in your marketplace, consider using them as well.  For example:

Solana & Hot Springs Dealer – Knutson Pools – Naperville/Chicago

This title tag offers instant recognition that your shop is a dealer for these brands with a location in Chicago.  With this additional information, a search engine user is more likely to find your content relevant to his specific request and therefore click on your link.

Remember that your title shows up in a large font at the top of each search engine listing.  As a user is skimming his search engine results, your title, and sometimes only a few words of it, will need to catch the user’s eye.  A title must serve two masters: SEO for positioning and attractiveness to a visitor.  Crafting titles to satisfy these two objectives will increase the quantity and quality of visitors to your site.

There are only a zillion shared hosting companies to choose from.  There are tons of features and options to consider, and some of the most important considerations require a some investigation.  I recently went through an exhaustive evaulation of over 150 hosting companies for my current and future clients and wanted to share my thoughts and process in this series of tips.

Tip #1 – Tech Support Capabilities

I've been responsible for evaluating shared hosting companies and plans for clients since 1998.  My number one most important criterion is the range of tech support capabilities.  Support generally comes in one of the following forms: telephone, e-mail, chat, and knowledgebase.  Here are some questions you want to consider asking:

During what hours is phone tech support available?  Many companies offer standard business hours for primary tech support, but will answer questions by e-mail after hours.  This is important to me as I often apply web page and programming updates after standard business hours with my clients.

If phone tech support is not available 24/7, what are the other support options?  Many companies offer support by chat after-hours, which I've found to generally be as good as phone support.  E-mail may be the other after-hours option.

What’s the turn-around time on e-mail support?  Some only offer support by e-mail.  This introduces a number of lags that may not be suitable for your needs.  If my client's site is not mission-critical or does not offer e-commerce, I like to shoot for having 2 to 4 hour e-mail support turn-around.

How good is the knowledgebase?  Many times, I don’t need to speak to someone about my support problem because I can find the answer in their knowledgebase.  A knowledgebase (KB) is a searchable database of support information, code examples, and other knowledge assembled by the support team over time.  Many times, a KB will answers to common questions and issues, so searching there first will often save you time.  A good knowledgebase should address a wide range of topics, contain a number of posts in each topic, and be easily accessible from your hosting account, i.e. you should not have to log in to see the KB.  A good host will be proud to make their KB accessible to all visitors, especially those evaluating its services.

Neither search engines nor visitors care to see a whole slew of words in the title.  In general, SEs cut off any title after 65 characters in length, and many visitors won’t look past the first three words, either.  Stuffing multiple city names and product names is usually not worth the effort.  Consider these titles:

Bad: XYZ Company – We Design Web Sites for Businesses in Chicago, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and St. Louis Using PHP and MySQL

Good: Chicago Web Site Design, PHP, MySQL – XYZ Company

In the Bad Example, the title is entirely too long and everything after Chicago will be truncated.  The alternate cities as well as the technology names will be lost and not impact SEO.  In the Good Example, we use 49 characters and convey the most important aspects of the page.  There are many factors to go into good title tag development, some of which I’ll cover in later segments.  For right now, I’m assuming that this company wants to attract customers in the Chicago Area for we site design services using PHP and MySQL.

One aspect of good site design is that each page has a separate topic and focus.  A short and simple title tag reinforces this notion as it forces us to think about what the pages is really all about.  What kinds of visitors should be attracted to this page?  What are the most important points of the page?  Keeping this in mind will make it easier to determine short, relevant titles.

Web page title tags are the most important aspect of on-page SEO, yet I find so many sites that completely ignore this very important concept.  If you want your site to have any chance of being found in search engine result pages (SERPs), attention to title tags is a must.

This article begins a series here related to title tags, their importance to SEO, and how to enhance your title tags for better impact in SERPs.

TIP #1 - Titles on Every Page

Make sure that every important page on your site has a legitimate title tag.  Any pages without tags, default titles like “untitled page”, or just the company or site name are the KISS OF DEATH for web page SEO.  Nameless or redundant pages tell search engines that there’s not much important content in them.  Doing this is like advertising in the phone book with just your business name under a category named “Unknown” and without your phone number.  It doesn’t make any sense for phone books or for SEO.

Ideally, every page on your Web site should be unique, so every page title should be unique as well.  The title should pertain to the content on the page (we’ll talk about this in a future tip) and use keywords found in it.  When a visitor finds your link and goes to your page, you’ll improve your chances of that visitor staying on your site if the page content is relevant to the title tag shown in the SERPs.