As a small business owner, you took a huge, crucial step and created a website. It’s beautiful! Yet, you launched several weeks ago, and nada. No visitors. What does it mean? What does this mean? Sorry, too much TikTok lately. One very important reason could be because the search engines haven’t found your site. But why, SEO Coach, you may ask. Plain and simple, search engines have to crawl through billions of sites, and if you don’t give them an easy way to find you, they won’t, at least not for a long time. The super simple SEO secret? Page titles! They are one of the most important items search engines use to find your site. Below, I explain why titles are so important, how to create them, and how to add them to your site’s pages. Let’s get started, so Google and the other search engines can find your site!
Why Are Page Titles So Important?
If you think of a page on your website as a book, and the search engines as a type of library catalogue, the importance of a page’s title makes sense. Is your home page named Home, your Services page titled Services, your About Us page titled About Us, or something similar. Back to the library analogy, if every book was named the same thing, how could you find the title you’re looking for? Same goes for search engines. These virtual card catalogs are filled with billions of titles. How many books do you know of that are named Home, or Services, or About Us? Or better yet, Book. Not many, huh? Remember those lessons in English? The importance of a title? The same applies for your website’s title. If you’ve done your branding work, creating a title will be easy. Your keywords play a crucial part, and with the right tools, you’ll be able to analyze them for the most effective ones.
How Do I Create A Great Page Title?
Not only are keywords important, but how many hits they get is also crucial. You don’t want to pick a term that no one searches for. How do you find out how many hits a key phrase or term gets? There are many resources, but one of my favorites by far is Keywords Everywhere. It’s not free, but the minimal cost will extend for many searches. Keywords Everywhere is an extension added to your browser, and works within the Google search page. When you do a Google search, KWE will not only tell you how many people search for that particular term or phrase monthly, but it will also give you related searches, what other people search for and long tail keywords. I’ll go into more detail about keywords in a future article. At the time of this writing, the cost is $10 for 100,000 searches. It’s well worth that price. Their site has easy to follow instructions for adding the extension to your browser. Remember to turn the extension off when you aren’t searching for your business. Otherwise you’ll find out some fascinating but useless information about a gift for your great aunt Myrtle.
Once you’ve found a keyword that has a decent amount of hits per month, you’ll want to make it even better. Think of how you do a google search, or better yet, how google fills in the field for you. Most of the time, your search fills in for you.
I’ve got the Super Simple SEO Secret, now how do I add it to my site?
If you are using WordPress, you can easily change your title. One way is to install the Yoast SEO plugin. The free version of the plugin is plenty for your basic SEO needs. Once you’ve installed it, go to Edit Page, and there will be a new Yoast SEO section below the text area. First, change your title at the top of the page. Next add your keyphrase in the space called focus keyphrase. If you enjoy a challenge, click SEO Analysis and change those red circles to green!
If you get stuck, no worries! I’m here to coach you through adding this super simple SEO secret and many other SEO tips and tricks. Check out my article on SEO coaching, or better yet, schedule a session!