What’s in a title? Why your web page titles are really important.

If your business has a web site then you need to be sure your web page titles are giving you the best opportunity to be found by your customers. 

What is a page title?

Each web page has a title and it appears in the title bar of your browser when people view your page. From a technical point of view the title is set by the <title> tag in the HTML that formats the page. You probably get someone else to create your web site or use an on-line tool like Wix, Go Daddy or 1 on 1 to make your web site, but you should still check your titles are giving you the best chance of being found.

Think about your keywords

Titles are really important because that’s what appears in the Google description of your page when people search for it. Titles can also encourage Google to place your page higher up in the search results.  You may already know that you need to think about the 'Keywords' included in the text of your page. Keywords, as the name suggests, are words which describe the key things about your business. Choice of keywords is important. You need to make sure your keywords are not too generalized. So if your business is a flower shop called 'Flower Power' in Luton then 'florist' is too vague as a keyword. 'Florists in Luton' is better. Your page title should reflect the main keyword for that page. A good page title for your home page might be 'Flower Power - florist in Luton'.
Remember the keywords and page title for one page on your site will be different for other pages. So if you have a page about wedding bouquets then this page should have keywords and a title that reflects what it is about.

Plan of action:

1) Think about what your top 4 or 5 keywords are for each page.
2) Make sure you use the keywords within the text for the page
3) The page title for each page should include your number 1 keyword for that page.
4) If you don't create the web site your self, check with your web developer that the titles are suitable

OMG! What have we just Tweeted?

There are risks to businesses using social media, as we discuss on the courses I give. In case you were in any doubt about this then you may like to know that US Airways, one of the largest airlines in the US with 420,000 Twitter followers have just accidentally Tweeted a photo of a naked woman. Apparently they were responding to a customer enquiry and were trying to flag the image as inappropriate but managed to tweet the picture instead. Exactly how they managed to do such a thing is not clear but I guess someone in their social media team may be taking a trip down the job center soon! You can read more about this embarrassing incident here.

Don't forget!
Check all your tweet, status updates etc. carefully before you hit the 'go'button. If someone sends you inappropriate material its probably best just to delete it and block their account.

Reset all your passwords?

If you have attended any of our courses you will know we always include a section on security and a discussion about passwords. You may also of heard that in the last few days concerns have been expressed about the so called 'Heartbleed bug'. See the article on the BBC web site here
So, do you need to reset all your passwords? The article isn't really clear about this but high risk passwords such as those you use for Internet Banking might need to be changed. The article also contains some useful advice about choosing passwords although it does not give much advice about how to remember them all apart from using a secure password vault (this is the method I use - a password protected Word Document on a USB memory stick).

Don't forget:

• Keep a backup of all your work! - on a USB device which you don't leave attached to your PC.
• Don't use all the same password for every account
• Use strong passwords, longer the better, use a combination of letters, symbols and numbers
• Check you internet bank statement regularly for odd activity - hackers sometime test an account by withdrawing a small amount before they start helping themselves to larger amounts.
• Watch out for suspicious emails.

Update!

Useful ideas on how to remember a random password can be found in this BBC News web site article

Well done to Specialist Cars Mini in Luton for a good example of how to use social media (see here)
Having purchased a car from them the salesman asked me if I would agree to have my photo taken with the car and have it uploaded on their Facebook page. He asked me to sign a form to agree to this (I don't think this is strictly necessary but your certainly need to ask). The picture was uploaded shortly after and obviously they are hoping I will share the picture on my Facebook (which I have!). If you sell low value items or over the Internet this is probably not going to work but with higher value items it work considering as a way of spreading the message about your product or service via social media.

Both Linkedin and Twitter have had a bad week.

Linkedin has seen its sales revenue fall recently. Linkedin has said it will concentrate on the following areas:

• China - Linkedin is the only major social networking site not blocked in China
• Job vacancies - it has recently bought a company that uses clever software to match people to vacancies. Most of Linkedin's revenue comes from paid job adverts.
• Mobile devices - 25% of Linkedin traffic comes from mobile devices

More about this

Twitter also saw its share price drop 24% after it reported a slowing in the growth of new users. Twitter is still making a loss (£396m loss in 2013). As well as the slowing in the growth users timeline views have dropped suggesting users are updating less often. More than 90% of Twitter's income is from advertisers who pay to have their tweets promoted. Twitter is promising several enhancements to improve the user experience so expect Twitter to be changing.

More about this

I have been pinning lots of interesting articles and social media to my Pinterest Social Media board. You can find the board here. Follow the board to keep up to date with the latest information on Social Media.
Incidentally, Pinterest is one of the big growers in 2013. In 2011 it had about 200,000 UK accounts,  by July 2013 it had 2 million! Not quite as many as Facebook with 31 million UK accounts, but Facebook accounts are not growing.

Search Engine Optimisation

If you want your web page to appear higher up in Google listings here is a summary of what you have to do:

1. Research your Keywords. How will people search for your site? What will they search for? These are your keywords and you need to make sure they appear regularly in the text on your site.
2. Try to get your most important keyword in your web site domain name. Also use your most important keyword in the HTML Page Title, and in Description Meta tags and image 'alt' tags
3. Don't use 'click here' or similar for link text, use your keywords!
4. Update your pages regularly (at least 3-4 times a week)
5. Make sure you text is correctly spelt and with good grammar.
6. Links - get as many sites as possible to link to your site, these 'inbound' links are how Google determines how useful your site is, more people linking to your site must mean its useful.

For more information read:
Complete guide to Search Engine Optimization by Ciaran Rogers and Daniel Rowles (Kindle only)
Outsmarting Google by Evan Bailyn and Bradley Bailyn