SEO

Did you know that most people who purchase online, begin their purchase using a search engine? These days that pretty much means Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Combined they control almost 90 percent of the searches that occur online. Google alone accounts for about 50 percent of all online searches (and it’s gaining market share rapidly).

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization or SEO is a term that is bandied about quite a bit these days. What is it really about? The bottom line is that search engine optimization are techniques that are aimed at getting a Web site to appear higher in the search engine results page (SERP). The search engine results page is the page that appears when you perform a search.

Most search engine users will not click past the third page of the search engine results. So when you think about it, there are only 90 spots available for your search term (10 slots per page X 3 pages X 3 search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN). So you really cannot afford to make simple mistakes in terms of SEO.

The Big SEO Mistake

So what’s the big mistake and how can you fix it? The big mistake has to do with your site’s title tag. Ok, now you’re asking what the heck is a title tag. Look at the top of your browser window. You will see a blue bar (unless of course you have changed the standard color scheme). On that blue bar you will see the title of this Web page (most likely the title of this article).

When first starting out most people put the URL of their site as their title tag. For example, somebody who has the site widgets.com, would use that as the title tag. This is a mistake for two reasons.

1. Unless you are specifically trying to rank for the name of your site (which should happen anyway) you are wasting a valuable resource. The search engines put considerable weight on your title tag. So if you are trying to rank for “green widget buttons” use that as your title tag. You can also combine terms. For example, on one of my sites - www.lingeriediva.com - we want to rank for “lingerie”, “women’s lingerie” and “sexy clothes” so we combine these in the title tag as “Lingerie|Women’s Lingerie|Sexy Clothes”. You can also use hyphens or commas.

2. On the search engine results page the title tag is used as the main listing in the results. People are more likely to click on an title that is more appealing and tells them something about the site than just the URL.

So, change your title tag to rank better and get more people to click through to your site.

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