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

Over at eBizMBA there is a list of the top 30 social bookmarking sites that just went up, dated December 2008. Based on a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank and U.S. traffic data from Quantcast, the list gives an relative view of who are the biggest players in this social media field.

We all know that these are real big names and many are recognizable even to the most casual Internet users. On the other hand there are many that you’ve never heard of! That’s what amazing about the list. Regardless, I must say some of these numbers are staggering! They really show how huge and popular these sites are, and how small the rest of us are. Here we go, courtesy of eBizMBA, the sites are:

1. digg.com - 382,792,751 – Inbound Links | 22,578,945 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 10,300,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 124 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
2. Yahoo!Buzz - 900,571 – Inbound Links | **128,556,575** – Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,500,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
3. Technorati.com - 75,306,437 – Inbound Links | 3,231,709 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,400,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 216 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
4. del.icio.us - 171,593,051 – Inbound Links | 1,699,128 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,300,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 248 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
5. Propeller.com - 997,000 – Inbound Links | 1,454,912 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,180,176 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 2,308 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
6. StumbleUpon.com - 19,050,177 – Inbound Links | 1,313,586 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 695,239 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 300 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
7. reddit.com - 45,307,577 – Inbound Links | 2,587,503 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 344,383 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 852 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
8. mixx.com - 6,175,082 – Inbound Links | 507,100 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 475,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,880 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
9. Fark.com - 11,438,723 – Inbound Links | 306,597 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,767,165 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,958 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
10. MyBlogLog.com - 1,742,265 – Inbound Links | 1,972,847 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 84,922 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 432 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
11. Slashdot.org - 13,555,035 – Inbound Links | 724,424 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 269,884 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 579 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 9
12. kaboodle.com - 100,266 – Inbound Links | 1,751,763 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 851,858 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 9,125 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
13. Bloglines.com - 50,717,948 – Inbound Links | 382,663 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 103,711 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 853 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 9
14. newsvine.com - 24,200,775 – Inbound Links | 315,857 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 203,761 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 3,977 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
15. blinklist.com - 23,770,576 – Inbound Links | 243,277 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 165,306 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 4,647 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
16. netvouz.com - 8,112,272 – Inbound Links | 75,507 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 54,325 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 15,048 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
17. clipmarks.com - 164,419 – Inbound Links | 196,107 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 147,131 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 6,740 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
18. Furl.net - 49,595,144 – Inbound Links | 148,975 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 57,547 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 4,112 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
19. Mister-Wong - 13,214,146 – Inbound Links | 25,416 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 3,432 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,889 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
20. dzone.com - 1,065,009 – Inbound Links | 100,784 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 117,897 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 5,187 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
21. ma.gnolia.com - 13,701,444 – Inbound Links | 110,662 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 32,363 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 7,454 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
22. Tailrank.com - 5,320,211 – Inbound Links | 71,563 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 35,783 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 28,920 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
23. ShoutWire.com - 168,480 – Inbound Links | 101,738 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 55,337 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 10,552 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
24. simpy.com - 13,107,730 – Inbound Links | 62,645 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 49,205 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 10,948 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
25. BlogMarks.net - 9,748,453 – Inbound Links | 61,740 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 28,075 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 11,880 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
26. BlueDot.us - 1,159,780 – Inbound Links | 107,717 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 60,045 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 12,072 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
27. Spurl.net - 18,628,253 – Inbound Links | 42,300 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 3,483 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 14,300 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
28. linkswarm.com - 150,842 – Inbound Links | 14,504 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 10,476 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 47,267 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 5
29. Spotback.com - 97,564 – Inbound Links | 42,838 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 5,037 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 42,015 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 5
30. MyBookmarks.com - 25,191 – Inbound Links | 10,934 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 7,727 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 108,226 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 5

By comparison, digg.com has 10.3M and Yahoo!Buzz 2.5M. Very impressive numbers and I think they will continue to grow at least for the foreseeable future, regardless of any market condition. Social bookmarking is only a subset of this whole larger social networking movement, which is probably one area that is pretty much independent of any social, market or political conditions around the world. In fact any new or extreme social changes will only serve as fuel for the social network to grow as we’ve seen it already time and again.

Despite this, many of us marketers are still struggling with this thing called social marketing. Well social marketing is here to stay, so just don’t get left behind.

So here are some questions:

What’s your favorite social bookmarking site or sites? How many of these accounts do you have? What’s the reason(s) for the multiple accounts and how do you manage them?

Do you prefer to get the news from social sites like these or from more traditional news sites?

Finally, as social networking evolves, what tools do you think will become important (or need to be developed) for us to streamline our online activities? Are there enabling technologies that we have yet been able to master? Your thoughts are welcome

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

30 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites, December 2008