Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I met with a friend yesterday to talk about simple ways to optimize a web site for search engines. He’s using a homegrown CMS (define) tool to manage content, and the guys who developed it did a great job on the interface, but left out a very important tool to improve search visibility for spiders and the people who search online - the ability to manage Title Tags.

In an excellent, descriptive Why use title tags? post over on Search Engine Watch, Carrie Hill uses pictures to illustrate the importance of them:

In this illustration:

1. Shows an unoptimized title - and Carrie says:
   “I can’t tell you how many Web sites I visit with the page name or title as “home” or “prices.” What a horrible missed opportunity to use some great keyword phrases to rank your page for something that will actually sell your product.I don’t think someone searching for “home” will want to buy pizza. So why optimize your page for the term “home?”
2. Shows a word list - “Spamalicious,” she notes:
   “Great — a bunch of lower case words about pizza. This doesn’t do anything but tell the search engines you’re trying really hard to rank for a variety of terms related to pizza.The first keyword is “pizza” — there are 134 million people competing for that term in Google. How many of those are your target audience? I’d guess about half of one percent.Put a location qualifier next to your keyword phrase if you rely on a local market…. many small business Web site owners miss the fact that not only is your page title a great way to tell the search engines what your page is about — it’s ad copy.”
3. Shows an optimized title tag:
   “This style is my personal favorite and very similar to how I write title tags for my clients and my own Web sites.”

Marketers can do some very simple things to boost the effectiveness of their web sites. Creating optimized title tags is one very effective way to make your site more relevant to spiders and the people you’re spending so much money trying to attract.

In this case, we need to enlighten ourselves so we can enlighten the folks who write the tools we use to manage our sites.

Your next question to your CMS provider should be:

“Can we punch a hole in this thing so I can add my own title tags? Get it on your list, please…”

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