Look Up – Look Way Up
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this is what the Friendly Giant use to say after he arranged the miniature furniture and wanted the camera to pan up to him to start another show of The Friendly Giant. For those of you wondering what might have happened to The Friendly Giant, Mr. Robert Homme died in May 2000 at the age of 81.
So, what does a line from the Friendly Giant have to do with marketing your business in Calgary?
Simple, look up, look way up. If you are reading this post, you have a browser window open. Look up to the blue bar at the top of your browser window. It probably says something like – “Business in Calgary – Marketing and Internet Strategies >> Look Up – Look Way Up”. In website design and search engine optimization we call this the title of the web page or in technical terms the title tag.
Now, open another browser window and check your web site. What does it say? Some sites same “index” others say “index.gif”, some say nothing at all. If you site has a title, that’s great, now click another page on your site, did the title change?
In my experience, this one simple tag can have a great impact on search engines like Google. A good title tag should include your company name as well as the primary product or service of your company, at least on the home page. All other pages in your site should contain their own unique title tags, based on the content for the page. Don’t cram everything into your title tag as this can be considered search engine spam, but do ensure that your key points are made.
So why is this tag so important?
The short answer is this is the headline for the page. Just like telling your users what they are looking at, use the title tag to tell the search engines what you are looking like. Consider this, if you see the following list of titles on a search page of companies selling office furniture, which would are users more likely to click on.
Title #1 – Calgary Office Furniture to Purchase or Lease
Title #2 – Office Furniture and Office Chairs at Discounted Prices
Title #3 – index
Title #4 – Office Furniture Sales and Installation
We have also found that in many cases, by doing nothing that adding a powerful title tag, we can achieve first place ranking on keywords within Google. Don’t believe me, click on calgary office furniture in Google, you will notice that the first site on the list is ks2.ca, one of my properties.
Good web designers tell me they know this already and it is standard practice. Although it should be standard practice, the real question is why do so many Calgary based companies have websites whose title tag is “index”?
Popularity: 9% [?]
Related posts:
- SearchMash.com – Google’s Testing Site and What It Means For Local Businesses Earlier this week, there were many bloggers writing about SearchMash.com. This site appears to be a testing server for Google to test out AJAX style...
- Intuitive Search Capabilities and Structured Results: Only on YellowPages.ca Next generation technology consolidates Yellow Pages Group’s leadership position in local search. Visit the Beta Site at – http://beta.yellowpages.ca and compare it to the existing...
- News Groups and the Newly Launched Google Groups Newsgroups? Ever heard of them? If not, here is a quick introduction, if so and you are a small business, the question is why are...
- Tags – Can Small Businesses Use Them Tags – say what? Most likely the first thought you had. I started playing around with Swicki, but the way is a brand owned by...
- Google Local Canada & Word of Mouth Advertising Let’s roll back a few months to what Ian Portsmouth of PROFIT Magazine / November 2004 wrote: “In the first decade of the Web Age,...
- Banners vs. Pay Per Click – Which is Better If you ask this question in a room full of web designers you would probably hear them say “pay per click” is better. When asked...
- Protect Your Business from “phishing” This past Sunday I was watching the CBC program Marketplace and they did a special on the criminal practice of “phishing”. For those of you...
- Google Responds To Privacy Questions Very interesting article on Google’s response to privacy by US Representative Joe Barton sent Google a letter with 24 questions relating to privacy — along...
- How Critical Are Your Web Stats To Your Online Success? In today’s marketplace, web site statistics are a very important tool to help us when making decisions about our web site. In case you are...