[SEO is guaranteed]
There is not a single SEO consultant who fully understands Google’s, let alone any search engine’s algorithm.  Let’s just say it’s slightly more complicated than A+B=C and in fact, even the head engineers only know portions of the algorithm.  In a nutshell, SEO success is built off of educated trial & error but you do have to know what the heck you’re doing.

[SEO is simple]
Learning the fundamentals of SEO are simple because they simply don’t change.  Good SEO is not just about applying the fundamentals, but rather the quality of links that are built to the site.  This part is not as simple as you would hope unfortunately.  A general rule of thumb that I have is that there is a general correlation of the level of difficulty of obtaining an inbound link to the quality and value that it brings to your site.

[SEO has instant results]
This would only be true in the case that SEO were magic.  Contraire my friend, SEO is actually a very time-consuming process.  The earliest I’ve seen results on a website I have worked on has been a little over 4 months with an average being roughly 6 months.  Put it this way, one night of healthy cooking will not result in 6 pack abs the following day.  You need months of consistent healthy meals and solid exercise to see those kind of results.

[SEO is a one-time thing]
If you’ve ever invested any marketing dollars, you might agree with me that one single campaign is simply not enough to sustain your business.  I suppose if this weren’t true, large companies wouldn’t need to pay an entire marketing division to continually come up with new messaging.  SEO is no different than any other marketing channel in that on-going maintenance is required to keep your competitors from outranking you in the search engines.  Bottom line, SEO is not a one time thing.

[Participating in excessive link exchanges with other website owners is acceptable]
According to the official guidelines set out by Google and I quote “Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)” are considered as link schemes.  I suppose to an extent this is OK as long as the two industries are relevant, but don’t put all of your eggs in this one technique.

[Stuffing the meta keywords tag with a ton of keywords adds tremendous potential to your search engine rankings]
This tag wielded some influence about 10 years ago, but not anymore.  That was until a few Viagra affiliate dummies decided to stuff their meta keywords tags with a ton of unrelated keywords.  Many people have run experiments with this tag (including myself) and the majority consensus seems to be that the meta keywords tag has no benefit in providing any benefit to your website.

[Pay per click campaigns will influence Google to give a good organic listing]
I’ve been surprised at how many companies seem to think that a pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns will entice the search engines to bump up your organic listings.  If that were the case, there would be nothing “organic” about the organic listings at all would there?  PPC campaigns are definitely beneficial and have their purpose, but my opinion is that they should be done once SEO is finished.

[A large quantity of links will get me top rankings]
Remember, I said “quantity” not “quality”.  This is what distinguished Google from every other search engine on the market.  They assigned every URL on the internet (that they could crawl) a unique rank termed “Page Rank” which calculates a value based on the quality of inbound links.  I always like to say that 1 inbound link from CNN.com is much more powerful than 100 links from some random, brand new blog.  One important factor I don’t want to neglect is that if you want to obtain a ranking for “best Seattle restaurant”, getting other sites to link to yours with the keyword “best Seattle restaurant” as the anchor text of the link helps more substantially than if the anchor text was simply the name of your website.

[Higher PageRank = Higher search rankings]
I think those who obsess over PageRank are either brand new to SEO or haven’t spent enough time doing enough of their own research.  To be fair, the majority of the case studies I’ve performed have shown that the results that show up high for popular keyword searches does indeed have high PageRank.  Many times I’ve performed a search and a website with a lower PageRank actually outranks the website with the higher PageRank.  In my opinion, PageRank only tells me how effectively a website channels and distributes the domain PageRank through its internal architecture (how a site links to other pages within the site).  At the end of the day, it’s just one of the hundreds of ranking factors that the search engines use in their algorithms.

[Content should be written for the search engines only, meaning they should contain lots and lots of keywords]
Although I believe the idea of “keyword density” is now dead, I believe that the emphasis needs to be on the visitor.  One of the rules of thumb I still remember and believe to this day from my AP English teacher was that word choice is critical in any writing piece and believe it or not, a word that is used repetitively loses its punch.  Do you BELIEVE me yet?    When you write content for your website, make sure it is tailored to users and not the search engines.  Your goal is to make the user come back to your website because the crawlers will come back whether they want to or not…after all, it is their job.

[Since Google has over 68% market share, optimizing for Bing and Yahoo doesn’t really matter]
It’s like an independent travel blog trying to compete against Expedia or Trip Advisor.  There’s no point right?  Wrong!  Not everybody likes Expedia nor does everybody like Trip Advisor.  Likewise, not everybody likes Google.  In fact, I had a client that got mad at me that I used screen shots of Google’s search engine results page in a report to show them their results.  The ranking factors overlap for the most part, but there are subtle differences that unfortunately do not mix well.  I will say that Google has started taking steps in the direction of awarding search engine placement for user experience.  I’ll share more on this in another article.

[You can avoid duplicate content penalties by changing and swapping around a few words]
There are so many syndication sites for people to submit their content to.  The question is how often do you submit your content to these sites?  Also, what the heck does “syndication” mean?  Ever seen a commercial that was played on two different television stations?  How about the same advertisement in two different magazines?  That is a prime example of syndication at its prime.  This unfortunately doesn’t work as well with content.  When Google detects duplicate content, it essentially looks at both sources and tries to determine who the original source is.  Google will typically pick the one they feel is the original and label the other pages as mirrors.  These mirrored sites automatically get a PageRank of zero.  I’ve seen this happen for the majority of syndicated sites, but there are others that have multiple copies of content over the internet that show a decent PageRank.  Conclusion, I think if you do want to syndicate your content, it might behoove you to actually re-write the content and either subtract/add a topic.

[There is no point in obtaining a no follow link because they have no value]
If you don’t have any idea what a “no-follow” tag is, it’s simply a link attribute that sits inside the link tag that tells the search engines not to pass any PageRank to the URL it is linking to.  Remember, each unique link to your site acts as a vote of trust in the eyes of the search engines.  So now that we’re all on the same page, what would the point be to obtaining links that have the no-follow attribute?  My testing has actually shown that no-follow links actually do help with your rankings.

[Keyword research is only needed if you don't know your customers or products]
Keyword research is a necessity by all businesses regardless of size, shape, color, or smell.  Whether you have no idea who your customers are or you know your customers a little too much where it borderlines creepiness (haha just kidding), determining which keywords are actually being used in the search engines is critical.  For example, do you think “cheap flights” is a better search term or “cheap flight”?  A quick use of the Google keyword tool shows that “cheap flights” gets roughly 25 times more search volume than “cheap flight” does.  This was one of the simple changes that I made that caused a ridiculous 450% increase in online bookings.  Even large and very established corporations sometimes need to go back to the foundations beginning with good ol’ keyword research.

[Linking out to other pages "leaks" your page rank - so avoid it at all cost]
If you spend a little bit of time reading through very established blogs, one common trait I see all of them share is the fact that they freely link to other blogs and websites.  The average blog post from a popular blog has a rough average of 3-7 links to other websites.  Part of being an expert in your field is knowing the right resources to link to that will provide maximum benefit to your visitors.  Although the act of linking to other sites provides no SEO benefit, what I’ve noticed is that whenever I link to other blogs, I either get referenced in future articles from those sites or I simply get a unique visit with a “thank you” for the reference.  This part is a bit of speculation, but I like to think of each page on your website as a lake.  If there are lots of inlets and no outlets, the water become polluted (information becomes all one-sided and has no other insight).

[Site loading time doesn’t matter]
Recently Google has launched a new tool called Google Page Speed.  They’ve also made some statements that page load speed may definitely become a ranking factor in the future because it falls under the user experience category.  It makes sense that Google is going to put a heavy emphasis on user experience of a website as their job is to deliver the best websites for particular keyword searches right?

[If you have the keyword in the URL, you will rank #1]
I have dozens of affiliate websites that have exact match domains, meaning that the domain of the website is a strong keyword.  Once I made the website live on the internet, I linked to the website from one of my test sites that were already indexed and on day 19, it was on page one of Google for the keyword search even though I had built no links to it.  I let it sit for another 2 weeks and it got bumped to position #13.  I built a few links to the site and today it sits at #3.  I don’t anticipate beating Amazon anytime in the near future, but considering the ranking I achieved for such little SEO work, not too bad.  All this to say that having your keyword in the URL will help, it’s not the be-all end-all solution to your SEO strategy.

[The search engines see singular keywords and a plural keywords the same]
Remember how we discussed the difference in search volume for “cheap flights” and “cheap flight” earlier?  Many people think that singular/plural keywords are not a significant factor to look at but as we saw it can be a significant one.  Another example would be “Seattle restaurants” and “restaurants in Seattle”.  Guess which keyword gets over 6 times more search volume?  “Seattle restaurants” does even though “restaurants in Seattle would be the keyword I would use off the top of my head to target”.  So think of a few keywords that you think you would like to target, visit some of your competitors and “borrow” some of the keywords they are targeting, or simply ask your friends/colleagues what they might use to find you in the search engines.  Compile a list of these keywords and see if any of them overlap.  It’s likely that the ones that overlap will be your strongest keywords.  Then write as many singular/plural versions of those keywords and run them through the Google Adwords keyword tool.  Of course this is only 15% of the keyword research process, but at least it gives you a good idea of what the potential demand may be.

I’m very curious to know if any of these come as a shock to you?  If you have a fuzzy idea of SEO that you aren’t 100% sure on, post it here and I’ll address it in the comments section.

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

A Plan to WIN

It was 4^th and goal with just enough time to get the ball in the hands of the quarterback to make one final play.  The team suffered so many cuts and bruises that the Band-Aid company probably experienced record sales.  One touchdown is all we needed to pull ahead and steal the championship title from our opponents.  I didn’t know what play we were going to run, but the one plan I knew the coach wouldn’t allow was for the quarterback to simply throw the ball to whoever was open.

The night air made it difficult to keep from shivering and remain undetected.  It had taken Bravo team more than half a day to maneuver just shy of 3 miles as stealth was a mission critical element.  Our mission was to recon enemy territory and scout critical access points of attack.  Oh and I suppose stay alive in the process.  The last thing to do in this scenario would be to issue a plan to have everyone do whatever they thought was best to complete the mission.  As the ranking officer of the squad, that would be the last thing I would do to my men.

Unzipping my bag to pull out my noise-canceling headphones, my intention was to mask the screaming espresso machine as I sat at a local coffee shop trying to shrink my work to-do list.  As thoughts began entering my mind about the endless ways to tackle it, let’s just say that drop-kicking a bear and dealing with the aftermath was one of the more pleasant thoughts at the time.  Would there be any benefit of alleviating my stress levels by tearing up the list and forgetting about it?

A game play, an operations order, or a business plan is crucial if you want to win, survive or succeed in business.

I’m sure that neither my high school football playbook nor my military orders will help your business grow, so let’s talk about coming up with an implementation plan for something that CAN help your business grow, SEO.  My hope is that you can take this list and use it ONLY as a launch pad.  Add to it, subtract from it, but ultimately…make it your own.

Marketing Assessment

• Set YOUR goals – (Are you interested in more visitors, more sales, longer time spent on site, etc?)
  
• Set milestones - (Some of your goals are going to take some time so these will let you know that you’re headed in the right direction)
  
• Determine how much time you will dedicate to SEO - (How much time will you have for other marketing techniques?)
• Determine whether you will hire a consultant or do it yourself? – (Remember, hiring a consultant = $$$$$ and doing it yourself = $)

Website Assessment

• Know current statistics – (Traffic, conversion rate, visitor behavior, etc)
• Know programming language(s) used and how they impact rankings - (Are you using JavaScript in any navigation links or referencing your CSS externally?)
• Set overall objectives and purpose of your website – (Is it going to be highly informational, interactive, retail, etc. as the SEO techniques will vary)

Team Building

• Gather your team members for the campaign - (If you have the man power, a project manager, developer, and a SEO specialist will be a solid team)
• Make sure everybody understands that SEO is not only time-consuming, but an on-going process - (A big misconception that could lead to quick discouragement is that SEO is a quick process and needs no maintenance)

Keyword Assessment

• Determine which keywords you want to target - (This is the most crucial step in the SEO process.  Mess this one up and any SEO work you do is useless)
• Make sure keywords are powerful enough and that you actually have a chance at ranking - (If you’re a new photographer, there is NO way you will rank for the keyword “photography”.  This process is actually a very difficult process and takes a while to learn to do properly)

Website Review

• Review the 3 pillars of SEO – (Content on your website, How your site links internally, and the quality and quantity of inbound links to your site)
• Develop a site optimization task list to optimize your site with the keywords you found - (Your SEO consultant can compile a list for you or you can learn the fundamentals and compile your own)

Reporting Expectations

• Determine which reports in your analytics software will indicate whether your goals will be met - (You should typically look at your reports once a week and look for trends)
• Based on your goals and expected reports to assess, determine what actions will be taken - (If your reports show that your goals are nowhere near to be met, what actions will your team take in order to get on track?)

Begin On-Site Optimization

• Set review dates - (This is to make sure that you are on track to finish your SEO on a timely basis)
• Test, test, and test some more - (As you begin making changes to your website, you need to keep track of your analytics to make sure it is not hurting your rankings)

Good luck!  Let me know how it goes!

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

Even though RoboCop was made YEARS ago before visual effects had a chance to evolve properly (also 3 years after I was born), I think the overall meat of the movie was very well-done.  Some may agree…others might disagree, but I personally don’t think I’d waste time by watching this old movie if I didn’t find it entertaining.

Let’s try this…think of any movie classic that you would watch.

• Goonies
• Ghostbusters
• Rocky 1-4
• Honey, I shrunk the kids

There are so many more, but let’s hurry up and wrap up this post so I can get back to my movie!

RoboCop schools us with a lesson in SEO

When you sit down to write the content for your website, it would behoove you to take the time and really do your research to make sure you’re putting great content out on the internet.  Not only does great content get stuck in people’s heads, it makes you the go-to source in your industry, it allows you to get your content indexed along with obtaining a swarm of links to your site. I mean, can you imagine how successful of a link bait campaign this would’ve been if RoboCop was nothing more than link bait from the government to gain some awareness for police officers?

If you stop and just think about how old RoboCop is, just imagine what great content can do for you in the next week, the next month, the next year, or even in the next 10 years!

Well, this is a rather short post and I hope you were entertained.  What are your favorite old school, classic movies not on the list above??

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

So I thought rather than talk about what my opinions are about where I see Google heading, maybe it’d be interesting to talk about where Google has come from and if we have time in the end, we can talk about what I see next for big G.

Still a Work-In-Progress…

• 1996 - The search engine (formerly called “Back Rub”) is placed on the servers at Stanford University in California
• 1997 - The search engine signs the papers and takes on the name “Google”.  If anybody asks you “what does Google mean?”  You can tell them that it is simply misspelling of a big BIG number!  1 followed by 100 Zeroes…so 1000000000000000000000000….no jk, I won’t perform a “googol” here.
• 2001 - The Google algorithm undertakes it’s first rewrite and now is able to incorporate other criteria to rank websites more easily
• 2003 - Google wins their first patent, which was the ability to assign more value to links from higher-valued sites
• 2003 - Google launches operation “Fritz”, which allowed a constantly updated index as opposed to indexing websites in batches
• 2005 - Google suddenly makes the world of SEO a little bit tougher with the launch of personalized search results.  This allows Google to provide you individualized search results based on your preferred sites.  So if you’re a little guy, chances are your website was being pushed further away from page 1 as most folks were clicking on the well-known big brands.
• 2005 - Operation “BigDaddy” is launched which in a nutshell, allowed a more widespread method of crawling sites
• 2007 - Universal search is brought into the search results pages, which actually was a big help to the few SEO’s that understood how to leverage it.  This update allowed images, news articles, book searches, etc to be introduced into the search results.  As users were naturally more drawn to an image rather than text, this was the growth stage for many clever businesses.
• 2009 - This was the most recent update, but the 3 search engine giants made deals with Twitter to include tweets in their search results pages so this is where real-time search comes into play.

So now with the search engine evolution out of the way, how has SEO changed?  Let’s dive into this a bit further.

Let’s utilize the 3 pillars of SEO to illustrate this topic.  As a fyi to those who are unfamiliar with the 3 pillars of SEO, they are:

1. On-page content - How are you providing benefit to the reader with your words
2. Internal architecture – How well do you link to other pages within your site
3. Inbound links – How many sites link to yours

For on-page content, I honestly haven’t seen any increases in the amount of weight that the search engines rank this factor.  I think a reason why this factor has kept a consistent or even possibly a decline in weight is that too many people have engaged in keyword stuffing, invisible text, or other unnatural & dodgy tricks.

Internal architecture has been something that is so comprehensive that I’ve seen some incredible results by making some tweaks in this department.  Flattening your site architecture, using the RSS technology with your sitemaps, removing content barriers are just a few ways in which you can flow more PageRank throughout your site.  What this does is that you typically see more and more sites come out of the supplemental index, which means that your PageRank is on the rise.

Getting a link from a website can cause a lot of small business owners a BIG headache!  Let me tell you this.

Getting a link to your site is NOT the same as getting a good link to your site

In rare cases do I see the on-page content changes make as substantial an impact as does building good links to your site.  Don’t get me wrong, doing the on-page SEO is absolutely necessary before you engage in any heavy link building campaigns, but you really can’t rely on any one of these pillars individually.

So now, where do I see the future of search?

First of all, I believe that the future of SEO is bright for a while.  Don’t get me wrong, Google and the other engines have come a LONG way to perfecting their algorithms, but I really don’t see the search engines achieving perfection anytime soon.  The whole purpose of a SEO expert is to help your business target the correct keywords and semantically tailor your relevancy to your audience.  You aren’t paying somebody a big paycheck to simply go through a checklist and categorize your company into one of their “package” options.  I think that Google is definitely working hard to knock those types of SEO folks out of the industry.  What I mean is that I believe that there is a day approaching very soon that Google will be able to see HOW a page is optimized.  If they see that a ton of pages are optimized in the exact same manner, my personal opinion is that there could be a few demoting factors that may harm the website rankings.

How about you?  Anybody else want to share any thoughts on this?

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

• Obtain monthly search volume not only for keywords you input, but also for related keywords that Google suggests
• Match-type

  • Broad – Allows your ad to show for searches on similar phrases and relevant variations
  • “Phrase” – Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase
  • [Exact] – Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
  • -Negative – Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term
• Under the “Choose columns to display” drop down menu, select “Show all” and you get this:

---

Google Search-Based Keyword Tool (SKTOOL)

• Allows you to tailor a keyword based on your language or country settings.
• The keywords are organized by category so you can see the most-searched keywords for your particular industry.

---

Google Trends

• See trends in how people are searching your particular keyword.
• The data goes as far as 4 years back.

You can see if a particular keyword is losing popularity

On the flipside, you can see if a different keyword may be gaining popularity

---

Google Insights

• Allows you to compare search volume patterns for up to 5 keywords at a time across specific regions, categories,  or time frames
• A great way to see how popular keywords & their variations are by POS
• While Google Trends did a great job of showing the trends and the areas that people were searching from, Google Insights also does that and a few other things
• A list of the related top searches along with the top rising searches
• A graphical world heat map which displays the search volume index (normalized)

Give it a go, if you would like to see some video tutorials let me know in the comments section.

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

• Forms: Crawlers cannot interact with forms. 
• Flash/AJAX: Crawlers cannot read any content that shows up in flash presentations.   
• JavaScript: Crawlers won’t run code snippets.  FYI, javascript is a computer programming language that connects to a server from an internet browser to download pages.
• Images: Crawlers generally can’t “read” a picture.  Most websites have banners at the top with the name of their company.  Just because you have a banner that says your website in big bold letters doesn’t mean that the crawlers see your company name.

So let’s take a look at how to correct these problems or find alternatives to find SEO benefit:

• Forms: If desirable content lives behind it, provide another way for the crawler to navigate there.
• Flash/AJAX: Other web application frameworks can be utilized here such as .aspx, .asp, .php, .cfm, etc.
• JavaScript: Make sure your links don’t require code to work.
• Images: Graphical menus should have text alt tags or CSS versions of links. Also avoid writing actual content into images

Hope this helps!  Stay tuned for more SEO tips!

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

Everyone knows Starbucks.  Their business is coffee.  Likewise, Boeing’s business is airplanes, Microsoft’s business is software, & my business is to help other small business owners drive more traffic to their websites and convert those new visitors to increased sales.  Man, that REALLY sounds like a cheesy business pitch…I can assure you it IS! 

Do you know who else has a business…possibly one of the greatest businesses in the entire world?

Google.

Their business is to give their customers the best websites available on the internet for every possible keyword variation.  With nearly 70% of people flocking to Google to find their answers, it just might make sense for your business to know what the most commonly searched keywords are for your industry, yea?

The art of finding these top keywords is called “keyword research.”  Performing keyword research has a bit of an analytical approach to it, but like I said before, keyword research is an art.  Good keyword research should target 3 different types of people.

1. People who BROWSE
   • These keywords should be a general snapshot of the company’s overall mission.
   • Example: “SEO”
2. People who COMPARE
   • These keywords should categorize & structure the content.
   • Example: “Seattle SEO”
3. People who PURCHASE
   • These keywords will be long -tail & extremely descriptive (i.e. “training schools for dogs to learn to sit and stay in Seattle” – these long keywords are referred to as “long-tail”)
   • Example: “Keyword Research Expert SEO in Seattle”

Bottom line is that without a good keyword research campaign, on-page SEO changes and even future link building strategies are wasted effort.  Think of it this way.  If you go overseas to a foreign country and speak a random language, you’re probably going to get a very small handful of people who speak your language.  The fact of the matter is that the majority of the population is not going to understand what you’re trying to say.  If you want people to find you on the internet, you need to be speaking their language.

The keyword research tool that I use is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  A great tool to use, but you need to know it’s power and also it’s limitations in order for it to be useful.

What are they saying?

How are they saying it?

In a nutshell, keyword research is the process of finding the right keywords that people are using to find websites like yours!  If you want to be found on the search engines, start with good keyword research.

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

“Stand for Something or Fall for Anything”

The meta description tag is quite possibly the 2nd most important on-page SEO factor behind the title tag. Let’s take a look at a Google search for “meta description.”

The snippet of text under the title tag (blue underlined link) is the meta description. If your meta description has your targeted keyword in a search query, Google will automatically make it bold (So very thoughtful of them). My experiments have shown that it is the second thing that a potential customer will see when they perform a search.

A few guidelines with the meta description tag:

1. Keep in mind that search engines typically display between 150-160 characters of the meta description in the SERP’s.
2. Include at least 3 keywords that the page is targeting.
3. This is what the searcher will see as they weed out the irrelevant websites & decide which website to click on so make sure the meta description is readable by humans.

The average customer will come to your site, spend about 10 seconds looking around and will affect your conversion rate based on your content. The meta description is your opportunity to prepare your potential customer with whatever you want them to know before the 10 second timer begins ticking.

A well-written meta description is a crucial step in giving your potential customers what they want, when they want it.

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!

My engineering career didn’t last long.  The theory of it was extremely interesting, but the actual work itself sure wasn’t.

>>>>Fast-forward 2 years later and here we are today.

As a former mechanical engineer (no offense to current mechanical engineers), I used to absolutely despise business networking.  Here was a typical conversation for me:

Other dude: “So what do you do?”

Me: “Oh, I just work at (Fill in your company here)”

Both: “……” *Glances at watch and laughs hesitantly*

Me: “This is really good food”

Other dude: “Mmm hmmm…”

Sound familiar?  It haunts me just thinking about how painful it was.  It wasn’t until I got into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) where I actually started to enjoy business networking.  The single aspect that I most enjoy is the look on people’s faces when I tell them I get websites to the top of Google & get paid to use Facebook & Twitter.  The follow up question I undoubtedly get all the time is:

What is the single-MOST important thing you can do to get better results in the search engines?

My Answer:

Changing the title tag is one of the most important fixes you can do to your website to get better search engine results.  What makes the title tag so powerful?  I’m going to show you what the title tag is first, then I’ll answer this question.  Think of the last time you performed a search in Google.  As a matter of fact, go do a Google search right now for any keyword.  In case you were too lazy to do the search, check out the graphic below.

Notice the blue underlined links?  That’s the title tag!  What makes the title tag so important is that the eyes of a potential customer are immediately drawn to them when they perform a search.  Not only do they have a bigger font size, they’re BLUE!

A few ground rules with the title tag:

1. Google will only display 60-70 characters of the title tag in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).
2. Include at least 2 keywords that the page is targeting.
3. Make the title tag readable by humans.

In order to stand out from the crowd, a well-written title tag is a crucial step after performing good keyword research if you want to give ‘em what they want when they want it.

Maximus says: Got a question about SEO consulting? If you have a few minutes, let's chat!