We are often asked to review websites to provide recommendations on how the business owner can improve them.

• 99% of the time, one of the improvements they would like to make is attracting more visitors (who wouldn’t like more visitors).
• 80% of those business owners haven’t made changes that is the most important factor in optimizing web pages for search engines, a would take an hour to implement.

Make the Page Titles Relevant and Different

The page title is what you see at the very top of your Internet browser. In the example below, the title bar is in grey and has the phrase “Dental Web Site Design, Dental Office Websites, Dental Online Marketing - PresenceDental”.

There was a study done of the top Search Engine Optimization experts in which they listed the most important factors in your web site ranking in search engines. The number one factor was the “Keyword Use in Title Tags”.

This was even more important than the number of incoming links to the web site.

That’s right - the most important factor to getting your site ranked for certain terms is that the keywords are in the title bar. Now this doesn’t mean that you change that and you’ll instantly appear at the top of the rankings.

What it means is that if you want to rank for a certain keywords like “Dayton Dry Cleaner” or “Talahassee Dentist”, you MUST have those keywords in the title bar.

The Problem With Most Business Websites

Too many businesses don’t pay any attention to this one field. They want to have their company name front and center but they don’t realize that this will only hurt them in attracting potential new clients. Here are some of the mistakes that most business websites make:

1. The Company Name is the only phrase in the Title Bar - You can still have your company name but just put it at the end of the title bar. Put your keywords first and then your name. Look at the picture above and how we have “PresenceDental” as the last phrase.
2. The Company Name is First - Just like the previous problem, businesses are too concerned with their company name and not describing exactly what the page is about. Most visitors will realize that it’s your business even if you don’t have your Company Name in the title bar. You don’t need to have it in the most precious spot - the first one.
3. Page Descriptions for Title - Don’t use “About Us” or “Contact Us” or “Services” as your page title. Use that as an opportunity to describe exactly what services you offer or where they can contact you (city name). Again, you can have the page description at the end but provide more detail for the search engines so they know more of what the page is about than just “About Us”.
4. Same Page Title on Every Page - I admit - we are guilty of this sometimes as well. But if you’re serious about improving the rankings for your website, don’t go after the same term(s) on every single page. Mix it up so you do a better job describing what’s on that page and you have more of a chance to get a “hit” on what people are searching for.
5. No City Name in the Title for Local Businesses - If you aren’t telling search engines what city you operate in and you cater to a local market, there is almost no way they’ll be able to associate you to that local market. You want to attract visitors searching for terms like “Charlottesville Plumber” and not just someone searching for “plumber”.

Take an Hour and Do This to Improve Your Rankings

Most small businesses only have about a dozen pages so they can make all the changes in less than 1/2 hour. If you don’t have access to your website, write down each of the new titles and hand them over to your webmaster to change.

Go to each page on your website and come up with a new title. Try to think of keywords that you want people to search for but make sure that it’s relevant to the page. For example, here are a few changes I would make for a chiropractor in Dallas:

• On your home page, make sure you have Dallas and Chiropractor. Maybe something like “Dallas Chiropractor, Dallas Chiropractic - Dr. John Doe”
• On a page about neck pain you could have “Dallas Neck Pain, Neck Adjustments, Neck Injuries”

Come up with a few terms for each page. If you look at the HTML code you will see the title near the top in code that looks like the following:

<title>Dental Web Site Design, Dental Office Websites, Dental Online Marketing - PresenceDental</title>

Take an hour to make these changes and search engines will begin to associate your web pages with the terms that you want to rank for. We’ve done it to many sites with few other changes and it can shoot them up from nowhere to the first or second rankings with no other effort.

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