Some "wow" information about Titles in blog posts

Written on May 21st, 2005 at 10:05 am
by Darren Rowse

The importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization

A few days ago I was moaning to a mate about the fact that despite thousands of inbound links and a page rank of 6 - ProBlogger.net is still yet to rank highly for many of it’s relevant search terms in Google - as a result I rarely get any traffic from Google on this blog. Even for a term like ‘Blog Tips’ (something I write about a lot) I only ranked around 60th on Google.

My friend asked a simple question that made me realize how blind a blogger can be when they stare at their own blog all day and lose objectivity.

He asked:‘What is in the title tags of your blog?’

As soon as he asked the question I knew how stupid I’d been. This is a question I often ask other bloggers but had not asked myself!

The title tags of my front page had been ‘ProBlogger: Helping Bloggers Earn Money’. A good descriptive term - but not including some of the key terms that I was wanting to get hits on - particularly ‘Blog Tips’.

NB: your ‘title tags‘ are what appears between in your blog’s templates. This title comes up at the top of your browser when viewing a page and comes up in search engine results as the title of your post.After banging myself on the head a few times for my stupidity I decided to do an experiment - I changed my title tags on my home page to ‘ProBlogger Blog Tips: Helping Bloggers Earn Money’. Just a tweak really - the inclusion of two words. I set this up and waited to see what would happen.

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The Hungry Little Spider- An SEO Bedtime Story

Here's a wonderful article about search engine optimization. It clarifies a lot of the "tricks" and gives you an idea of how many ideas are outdated and can ultimately get you into trouble:

The Hungry Little Spider- An SEO Bedtime Story: "The Hungry Little Spider
An SEO Bedtime Story
By Scottie Claiborne© 2004
Once upon a time, in a land called WWWebdom, there lived a little spider. It was a hungry little spider and it liked to munch up web pages and then keep track of which ones it liked best, so it could tell other people just how good they were.
The little spider never ran out of pages to munch because each page told the spider where to find other yummy pages (links). When lots of pages pointed him to one page, he usually found that page to be very tasty. Also, the more links he found to a specific page, the easier it was to remember it to tell others about.
*Incoming links are important to get your site found and ranked well.
Sometimes people tried to tell the spider which pages they wanted him to try and every so often, he'd check out some of the invitations he received. Usually, those pages weren't attached to any other pages, so the spider would be bored and forget they were there.
*Submitting your site to the search engines doesn't do much good without incoming links."

Read the rest of the article here....