Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Here`s an interesting site, where you can enter your own domaiin (without the "www") and get a report. http://www.sitetiki.com/Main_Page

Kathy found the site, and the resulting report was fascinating! Two things became clear, reading the basic report then following links. The first is that a meta-tag description really does have to have 150 characters or less. It also must be VERY well written, and clearly describe what you`re selling in just those few characters.

The second thing is page titles, and the links to other pages on your site. Reading our own site, the list of links on our home page read like a Table of Contents.

We`ve heard a lot about having a site map on your Web site. That`s fine, but what about the page titles to each of your pages? Can you start at the "index" page, and just by reading page titles, understand what the site`s about, and what it offers?

How many times do we see sites where the main landing page is titled "Home?" What does that do? Nothing.

Think of all those outlines you had to do in school, and all the tables of content you`ve passed over in books.....until you need to find something. Can you look at an outline or TOC and get the sense of the book or the topic? For example, here would be a poorly done site, based only on page titles:

• Home
• /domain.com/03Tjkl.html
• domain.com/about us based on our history and whatever we put into the description area of the page file
• Page 2

Does that tell you anything at all? And yet, more and more "reporting" sites go through your Web domain and gather up page titles and their links. They look at each description, and if that doesn`t exist, read the first 150 characters of text.

Do you have headings and subheadings on each page that quickly explain why that page exists? Consider these page titles:

• Custom Designed T-Shirts - Home
• How We Make our Shirts
• Product Catalog
• Order our T-Shirts
• FAQ
• Questions? Contact Us

Just reading down the list of pages (or a list of links to those pages), wouldn`t you say you can get a very clear understanding of the site? You don`t even have to visit the site to know exactly what`s going on.

Take a look at the page titles and meta descriptions on each of your site pages. Run the report through SiteTiki, and see what you think. Pretty amazing, isn`t it, how slowly but surely, all these "other" Internet locations are picking up information and putting out there in the world....for everyone to see. :-)

I agree that most sites do not utilize their page tags like they should. But from an SEO standpoint naming your title tags "FAQ" and "Questions? Contact Us" isn`t going to help at all.

 

My suggestion is to name your title tags what your keywords. For example if you are selling a web software and your main keyword is "contact manager" then name your FAQ page

 

"Contact Manager FAQ - Product Name"

 

Obviously you cannot use your keyword on every page, but you should always have the site name and your keywords there whenever possible. It is one of the most overlooked SEO strategies.

 

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I`m surprised that search thing even found your site.

Oh sure...we`re definitely way up there! :-) I think we`re 9,400,000 in Alexa! Only 9,399,999 more to go and we`ll be Number 1 on the Internet!

As far as SEO and having useful titles, I think that if the content and other tags are right, they`ll likely do a whole lot more for visibility than the titles in and of themselves. What`s interesting, in these types of reports (link valet is another one) is that they`re reporting out a lot of the site, in a "list."

We do signal flags, and we`re everywhere. You can`t even search images for anything related to the flags without our showing up, so it`s not a visibility concern at all. Instead, it`s the link title in results and reports. So, for example, if Google finds out "About our Flags" page, the description explains the product, the actual URL is the company name.

At that point, the human being who`s reading the results page can choose to find out more about our flags, just reading the page title. SEO is all well and good, but if it comes down to a choice between catering to a human customer and a mindless computer, I`m thinking we`ll go with the potential customer. :-)

I`m not saying we don`t use SEO techniques all over the place; we do. It`s that we get a lot more bang for the buck using those techniques all over the site itself, with the page titles being more like headlines. Plus, there`s only so much room in a page title, and having the company name on every page makes it too long.

No, I mean the sitetiki thing. I played with it a bit and they are missing a LOT of sites.

LOL!  Listen, we put our site into Alexa the year after I was born, because we heard there`s a waiting list. It took 55 years, but by golly...we finally showed up!

I have no clue how we end up in places where we do, and that`s what`s really interesting to me. I`ve done a lot of SEO writing, and of course, applied it to our own site. I`ve learned new techniques, found other stuff, and blah-blah-blah, right? But I never even *thought* about this "listed page titles reporting" until I saw us showing up in these off-the-wall locations.

I mean...it`s like we`re not registering with the places, we`re not doing nuthin` other than just what everyone else does. Then along comes some battleship of an indexing place, grabs the site, and simply reports out what they found.

Believe me, it took a minute or two to figure out how to best describe our flags in exactly 150 characters (including spaces and periods). But when that description got picked up, right from the meta description, it suddenly began showing up all over these other places.

So....I`m just sayin`....be careful how you list your page titles because at some point, they`re gonna end up looking like a simple outline or TOC in some report by anonymous machines. :-)

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