SEO - Sometimes a Title is all it takes

Over and over again I come across websites with good content, they've been around ages, have lots of links to them but still they are not doing as well in the search engine results as they could be.

They come to me and ask me to SEO their site. They expect to pay hundreds, or even thousands for the service. The businessman in me says - great, find everything that's wrong with their site down to the last missing comma and quote to fix it. The SEO in me however knows that with a site like this more often than not, all that's missing is a title on every page. In this case the SEO on my shoulder wins and I'll quote just to fix their titles with a caveat that if it needs further work, we'll address it down the line.

In this case the title is usually the same on every page:

<title>Company Name Ltd</title>

The process of optimising these sites is just to go through and make sure that the title describes each page:

<title>Widgets, doo-das and thingamyjigs from Company Name Ltd</title>
<title>Small self-adjusting widgets from Company Name Ltd</title>
<title>Manual adjust doo-das from Company Name Ltd</title>

Suddenly the person searching for "Manual adjust doo-das" not only finds the site, but finds the exact page that sells this product and traffic and sales from search engines increase by several-fold.

The thing is, adding a title is not just a secret that applies to SEO. Every document or piece of paper your company produces probably has a title on it, so why not every web page? It's a simple thing to ensure you include on every web page and it pays dividends.

4-Oct-2005