Web page titles are an important element of getting traffic to your site for the following reasons:

• Page title is one of the few elements search engines show in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Therefore the words in the page title do carry significant authority in the subject matter of your web page content.
• Because page titles are representative of the content on a page, it’s an effective technique to link to pages using their page title as the link anchor text. This is another SEO technique discussed in another post on link anchor text, and it directly influences click-through rate (CTR).
• On a SERP, more informative page titles are likely to attract clicks from a searcher because it meets his search needs. Good, descriptive titles stimulate an emotional response and promise to the searcher that what he is looking for can be had by clicking on your search result. This is a key differentiator between your site and other sites listed on the same SERP.

It is recommended that your page titles be different from page to page on your site. And when pages have similar content, thus causing similar sounding page titles, try to creatively vary the keywords within the title so it is clear that the 2 titles are different and represent 2 different pages.

In addition, the format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be somewhat different than the words in your page meta description and on page headers.

Finally, if you look at a typical Google search result page, you’ll notice that Google does not display the page title beyond 65-70 characters. Therefore your title should fit within 65-70 characters and anything beyond that will be cut off by the search engine. You may still write longer than this character budget to provide great user experience for your web visitors, but be sure to put all important keywords up front before the 70th character.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title

This is from an older article at Forbes.com titled “Peter Drucker On Marketing” by Jack Trout. While it’s dated back in July 2006, good writings stand the test of time, and this one is no exception. Mr. Trout wrote that perhaps today’s executives are just getting it wrong in their priorities.

Peter Drucker observed:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

Top management surveyed today probably name their priorities to include the likes of finance, sales, production, management, legal and people. Missing from the list, as Mr. Trout pointed out: marketing and innovation. He listed 4 important steps to help an executive find the proper direction. These are:

1. Make sense in the context. What does the market place perceive you and your competitors to represent? Do you know what the market wants? If you do, how do you differentiate yourself from the competitors?
2. Find the differentiating idea. Be different, be one of a kind, be not the same. And it does not have to be a differentness in just products. There are other areas of the business that can be used as your secret weapon.
3. Have the credentials. However you are different or claim you are different from the pack, you must prove it with credentials, demonstration, and logical argument. Customers are smart and knowledgeable. If you let them ask skeptical questions about your claim, then you have a faulty start and an uphill battle on your hand.
4. Communicate your difference. In the Internet, social media and social networking market environment, you can’t be too sure that customers will beat a path to your door. You have to work for it. Tell them what makes you different.

Marketing is definitely not everything. But it’s one very important thing. Management who understand that marketing is a high priority must-do item on their to do list will be way ahead of their competitors, in any market condition. They will enjoy rosier roads ahead of them. And much sooner too. Because marketing should be a way of doing business, and not a new company initiative.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Executives May Just Be Getting It Wrong the Whole Time.