One of the most common questions I get asked is “What’s the easiest thing I can do to make my site show up higher in Google?”
While there is no one size fits all method to good search engine optimization, you can get some easy traction by simply optimizing your title tags.
Why are Title Tags important? Here are just a few reasons that will convince anyone.
For the past several years, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ, has asked the top SEOs around the world to rank the important elements of good SEO. Guess what ranks at the top every year? That’s right, Title Tags.
See for yourself. The full report can be found here http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
None other than Google itself will tell you how important Title Tags are to search engines. Google puts out a Search Engine Optimization Starter guide, which can be found here http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf, and it states, “A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.” You can’t get more upfront than that.
Over at Google’s Webmaster Blog, we get even more support for the importance of Title Tags, “Search engines index pages based on the words contained in them, and including descriptive titles helps search engines know what the pages are about.” The rest of this terrific blog post can be found here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/10/target-visitors-or-search-engines.html.
The title tag is a really low hanging fruit. With a quality keyword list and a couple of hours, you can start to make some easy improvements to your ranking in the search engines. Now, get out there and start optimizing!
