Web Design Tips and Tricks

Don’t Put Your Slogan in the Title Tag - Optimize Your Web Pages

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Don't just put your slogan in the title tag when you formulate the copy of your website. The formulation of the title tag is the most important single aspect when you fine-tune your website:

1. It is what people first read when the listing of your site turns up in Google and other search engines.

2. It is the single element of your website that the search engines pay the highest emphasis on.

If you look up the source code, the title is what is between these tags: title and /title in the hard brackets. You can get the length of your title tag checked here: http://www.scrubtheweb.com/cgi-bin/webtools/meta-check.cgi

A typical slogan isn't stuffed with important keywords. My slogan for my stock photography business is "Stock photos from most of the World" and I am quite happy with that. It is honest and catchy which I like. But it isn't a good title for my website of A-Z Fotos: www.azfotos.com . Let us analyze that as an example.

The first two words of the slogan would be fine as the title tag because 'stock photos' are among the main keywords for A-Z Fotos. They are also fine because they are put in front of the title tag. Don't forget this so-called 'keyword prominence' in title tags.

They also function well when people are browsing down the listing after the search button has been activated, because people tend to look for exactly the word they wrote in the search box.

But the words 'from most of the' is absolutely useless. It is the kind of words that the search engines simply ignore because they are too common. The last word 'World' isn't any better. Nobody would search for the 'World'. - To say it mildly, it is too broad!

The alternative to your slogan is to formulate a title which includes your most important keywords for the specific webpage in such a way that it is attractive when the surfer browses down the search result.

For Google the title shouldn't be longer than 62 characters. Include your brand name if it includes keywords. Otherwise avoid it in the title unless it is very well known. As always be careful to choose relevant keywords and combinations of words that are often searched after. I always check at

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ for the relevance of the keywords I have in mind. Be aware that many keywords are to some extent seasonal. Overture offers the frequency of searches in US of last month.

Searches in UK can be checked at

http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Remember to make the title tag even more specific for your subpages, i.e. the pages after the home page (index-page).

Avoid having more than one page with the same title.

Okay, one of the reasons why posting has been light on this blog is because we have been busy. My wife and I have also had our first child (well, two years ago) and to be honest, our work has become less innovative in terms of doing cool new things and more iterative, as in we have been applying a lot of the cool things we learned and developed over the last few years.

This happened because we changed our business model from agency style to "plug us into your operations and we will be your dev crew" style.

Anyways, every once in a while we like to take stock and see where we may be able to gain some time so as to try and work in our next direction or new model, whatever that may be. The applications that we use are often places where we can find cool new stuff and gain time.

What things have you done to find extra time? Please, share below!

Here are three things that, in the last year point five have helped us find some extra time.

1. Navicat: we moved all of the bits of PHPmyAdmin accesses over to navicat at about the end of 2007 and this was an excellent move. Tonnes of time gained.
2. TeamViewer: for quick support and desktop sharing with remote staff.
3. Buying a netbook and using Maxivista and Ultramon: adds two new monitors to my existing setup. I now have a 4 monitor two computer setup which allows me to not only have two more monitors but I can also have open two versions of many of the apps that I use (useful for multitasking with teams etc.)
4. Moving simpler client sites to WordPress: now that it has one step upgrades and almost doesn't require the use of an FTP client to get up and running on some hosts.
5. Dictation Software: I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for writing some course and blog materiel lately (pre-writing for my new blog). I find this is saving me a load of time and I am getting more written then ever before.

So what solution have you implemented lately to buy you some extra time?

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