Gimzoo

Title tags: Give your blog a search engine boost

Title tags.

No, they are a not the ones hanging on that new suit you hated to buy for your cousin's wedding.

They are the words that appear, on the very top bar of your web browser, for every page on the internet that you visit.

They are extremely important to gaining strong search engine results page (SERPs) results for your blog's most important keywords.

Mainly, I have been focussing your attention on your on page copy and developing your incoming link popularity. Those are still very important and should never be neglected.

Some search engine experts claim title tags are equal in importance to content and incoming links. Title tags are certainly an added booster shot, for your blog's placements, in the search results.

What are title tags anyway?

They are the name of your blog, as appears on the clickable link in the search results. If your blog title is in your title tag, that is what will appear in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, AOL, etc.

What we want to do here, is to make some improvements on what appears on the top of your browser bar.

I use the blog title Blog Business World as my title tag for this blog. It covers the main search terms. I may make some changes to reflect some other search results that found my blog.

On my roller derby blog, the title tag reads "Roller derby news and commentary - Wayne's Derby World".

It reflects the fact that the most important keyword phrase, by far, is "roller derby". Note that the keyword phrase appears at the front of the title tag.

I left the blog title up there, as many people search for my roller derby blog, by its title. It's becoming a bit of a brand name in roller derby circles.

To find your title tags in your blog template, they are located in the HEAD section like this:

HEAD>

<>ABC Blog Title

HEAD

Note: The word "TITLE" should appear inside the <> and . The word HEAD should be enclosed in to close all of the tags. Be sure to properly close your title tags in correct html. Blogger won't publish let me publish them directly, as an example.

The title tags are generally followed, in the HEAD section, by your META description and META keywords. Different blog templates and web page building software will place them in slightly different spots. Don't worry about that.

What is important is what is written in the title tags.

Let's say your title tag reads:

<>ABC Blog Title

Is that how people find your blog in a search. Check your referrer logs for the most numerous search terms. We are talking about the top two or three keywords only here.

For example, you are a political blogger. That is certainly a competitive area. There are many political blogs, publications, websites, everything else related to politics on the internet.

All of them are competing with your blog to appear on Page One of the SERPs.

In our example, we are going to use the example of the Iraq War. That keyword combination will generate 7 million results on Google.

7 million!

Your blog, with ABC Blog in the title tag is not going to be found in the first 100 results pages, if at all.

What you can do, is change your title tag to this option:

<>Iraq War News - ABC Blog Title

You may have a specific area of the Iraq War that you study more carefully.

Your title tag would then become"

<>Iraq War News - hostages - ABC Blog Title

Note that your specialty is now included.

Always use hyphens as the search engines see them as blank spaces. They do NOT see under_scores that way. The search engines view under_score words as one word: underscore.

Don't use all capital letters in your title tags either. It doesn't look attractive, appears to be shouting, and the search engines consider it to be "spammy". Simply write the words as you would normally see them written in a sentence.

By making changes in your title tags, and adding your very most important keywords to the front, you will rise in the search engines.

It won't be over night. It might take a couple of weeks to a month, but the improvement will happen.

Think title tags and move on up!

Carnival of the Canucks goes to Cowtown

Among the many great blogger carnivals on the internet, there is one area that features Canadian bloggers.

Like me.

It's called, appropriately enough, Carnival of the Canucks.

This time around, leading Canadian blogger Vicki Smith, of Just In From Cowtown is hosting Carnival of the Canucks.

In fact, Vicki loves hosting the event so much, this is her second Carnival of the Canucks at her blog.

Canadian bloggers are featured with posts ranging from Canadian and world politics to technology to dust bunnies.

I have a post included as well, but there is no way I can compete with dust bunnies. Who can?

Next time, which is Tuesday, May 18 by the Canadian calendar, Carnival of the Canucks will be hosted by the eclectic Ghost of a Flea.

Carnival of the Capitalists time again

Once again, the big top of the ongoing business and economics series Carnival of the Capitalists, rolls into town.

This week, the big tent is pitched at Brain Brew Radio Blog, where you can peruse their great hosting of Carnival of the Capitalists at your leisure.

Included this week are blog posts from some of the leading business, legal, political, and economics bloggers on the internet.

I have an entry in the mix this week as well.

My rather lengthy (some would say long winded) post on posting on internet message and discussion boards as a way to promote your blog appears this week.

It's entitled "Blog promotion: Message boards".

Be sure to cruise on over to Carnival of the Capitalists at Brain Brew Radio Blog and read away.

There are so many good posts to read, you'll be lost at the Carnival of the Capitalists for hours.

Renaming your "links" lists

Most bloggers have a section on their blogs named "links" or "blogroll".

Those are standard issue terms for your...well...links and blogroll.

There is a reason to change those names, however.

It is thought, by many search engine watchers, that the dominant search engine Google may be discounting or even ignoring links pages. Whether that possibility applies to blogs is unknown.

The reason links pages on tradtional websites are losing their Google PageRank (Google's numerical measure of the importance of a website on the internet) is link exchanges. As we all know, link exchanges are a backbone of blogging. We don't want that valuable blogging tool discounted in any way.

Of course, we are not sure if Google has any concerns with the terms "links" and "blogroll" on blogs. No one is certain and Google isn't talking. Google never does.

I do know that at present, on the blogs that I have randomly checked, Google has counted the blog links as normal.

With the search engines constantly changing their algorithms (the mathematical calculation of where a webpage is positioned in the search results for the term entered into the search box), the possibilty of discounting and ignoring still looms.

What I have done, on all three of my blogs, is take a pro-active approach.

I have changed my "Links" to "Directory" and "Resources". Whether the change has had any real effect, I can't say for sure. I do know that Google counts my links, on all three of my blogs, with no problems.

If you change the term "links" to something else, it should prevent any ignoring of your links by the search engines. Because of the changing nature of blogrolling, I don't forsee a problem there for the forseeable future.

Besides, changing the name of your links list gives you a chance to be really creative, while preserving the power of your links.

That sounds like a great idea to me.

Blog promotion: Message boards

Everyone is searching for ways to promote and market their blogs. I’m sure you are no exception.

Simply building a blog, and placing out there on the internet, doesn’t guarantee success in internet marketing. In fact, by failing to publicize and market your blog or any other website, it is almost certainly doomed to failure.

The old idea of “if you build it, they will come” might work for a movie script writer. It won’t likely work in the real world. You need to find simple, low cost ways to promote your blog to potential readers. For a business blog writer, those readers are also potential customers and clients.

One proven technique, that is well known and practiced by the internet marketing pros, is posting on internet message boards and forums. By posting on the message forums, savvy marketing people gain visitors, establish themselves as experts in their field, and multiply their success many times over. You can too.

All you have to do, is start to think like a marketing professional. The internet discussion boards, and even some of their other members, will do much of the marketing on your behalf.

Internet message and discussion forums are everywhere. Their many members discuss topics ranging from baseball to photography to crafts to search engine optimization. Whatever your business or hobby, there are numerous internet message forums awaiting your membership.

There are also some very good and active blog specific message boards. You will want to make a point of joining and participating on them.

Blogger Talk

Blogger Forum

Forum4Bloggers

Yahoo Blogging Community

About.com Weblog Forum

To join most message boards, you will have to register as a member. The membership process usually requires you to provide a user name.

You may use your real name, or if you prefer, you can create a fictional pen name, called a “handle”. You will be required to provide a valid e-mail address for communications.

Some forums require some additional personal information, to protect the message board, from those who might wish to destroy their online community. Your information is almost universally protected by a password.

Once you have that information in place, and had your membership approved and confirmed, you are almost ready to post.

You are not quite ready yet, however. You still have a few things to do, in order to have your message board postings help market and promote your business and your blog.

In order to gain new visitor traffic, develop a solid reputation, and gain search engine optimization benefits, you must create what is known as a signature file, or “sig line”.

What a signature file does, is create a live link back to your website, from the message forum itself. That link into your website is very important.

The signature file for your link should not simply be your website’s URL. If at all possible, avoid that type of signature as it doesn’t describe your business. It also provides less than the desired level of search engine optimization. Using your blog title is better, but still is not what you want to use.

Use a your targeted keyword phrase as your signature. If you can use the keywords, right in the live link, that is the best possible signature. It provides a keyword inbound link to your website.

Many message forums permit the use of additional descriptions, brief offers to visitors, phone numbers, and even physical and e-mail addresses. Take advantage of these free promotional vehicles.

By targeting your most important keyword phrases, you accomplish several important goals at one time. You successfully describe your blog or business, and possibly what your blog offers for anyone clicking on the link.

You also gain powerful keyword rich backlinks to your blog, enhancing your incoming link totals. Incoming links help raise your blog in the various search engines for your keywords.

Armed with a message board membership and a signature file, you are now ready to begin posting on the forum.

When you post, you want to be polite. Ask good questions seeking any information that you require. There are no foolish questions. Everyone was a first time poster at some point, so don’t be shy.

If you are able to answer other members’ questions, feel free to do so. By providing good informative answers that seek to help others, you will develop a reputation as being an expert in your field. That will go far in enhancing your business reputation as well.

As you develop a reputation for providing informative and helpful postings, your opinions and posts will almost always be read by other members.

Since the members of the message board are also interested in the same subjects as you, they are all potential readers for your blog. Their families, friends, and business associates are, by extension, also your potential blog readers.

By becoming well known to the board membership, your reputation and that of your business will grow. People usually prefer to do business with people whom they know. That would be you, if you have been writing good thoughtful and informative posts.

They will click on your signature line and check out your blog, your business, your products, and your services. Many will become customers and some will even recommend you to others as well.

Most blog message forums are search engine spider friendly. It is important to note, however, that not all message boards are crawled regularly by search engine robots; but most are. Make certain that you check the search engine friendliness of the board prior to joining.

The backlinks created by your signature file will be crawled by the spiders. Google often includes forum posts in your backlink count. Since Google only displays incoming links, with a PageRank 4 or higher, those are very good incoming links indeed. Posting on forums simply increases your number of incoming links.

By placing your blog’s most important keyword phrase in your signature file, your keyword power in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is enhanced. The more keyword rich links you can create, that are pointing toward your site, the better.

As you post on a regular basis, and establish yourself as an expert in your industry, you will find a number of other members linking their site to yours.

These natural links are a tremendous boost to both your site’s Google PageRank and to your search engine placements for your keywords.

The potential for additional natural incoming links, makes posting on a message boards a powerful technique, for increasing your backlink total.

You will also find theme related blog owners who will want to engage in traditional link swaps as well. These exchanged links are still helpful to your blog. They are especially beneficial if they are from sites that are related to your own.

Seeking out a number of message boards, related to your area of interest, is a powerful way to market your blog.

Your marketing efforts will be greatly enhanced through your participation, as an active contributor, to your various discussion boards. Members of those forums will see you as an expert in your field, making it much more likely that they will become your customers and clients in the future.

Your search engine marketing will improve as well. The additional incoming links, resulting from your post signature line, will enhance your Google PageRank and your search engine results.

Keyword rich incoming links will raise your blog higher in the search placements. You also have the potential to receive many natural incoming links, along with a number of themed link exchanges.

Join those internet message boards today and start posting your way to success.