Title Tags Guide | Good & Bad Examples What is a title tag? How do you write one? Why are title tags important? Do they actually help with search engine optimisation? Can I see some good and bad examples? Following on from our blockbusting guide 22 SEO essentials for optimising your site, I thought I’d follow up the advice on title tags and answer all of the above questions. If you just want a quick guide to optimising title tags, click here to jump to the checklist section. For the rest of you, first lets talk about meta tags in general: What are meta tags As Kristine Schachinger described in our previous guide to tags back in 2012, meta tags are HTML elements that provide information about a web page for search engines and website visitors. These elements must be placed as tags in the <head> section of a HTML document. Title tagMeta description We’ve discussed how to write meta descriptions in a separate post, so for now let’s discuss title tags, the most important meta tags on your site. What is a title tag? Title tag checklist
2015 SEO Checklist Infographic | IDF Marketing Happy New Year! 2015 has arrived and it’s going to be a big year for Digital. With this in mind, Lets get your SEO Campaign 2015 Ready with our SEO Checklist! Be Accessible Do’s It is important your website has a homepage that is easily accessible.Your website should be arranged in a clear, hierarchical or ‘tree-like’ layout.Link internally to other pages within your website, links allow Search Engines to crawl and index your other pages.Use ‘breadcrumbs’ such as ‘previous’ or ‘next’ buttons – this aids user-ability and is search-engine friendly.Ensure there is a Search Box panel on your webpage to aid in site navigation. Don’ts Create pages that cannot be reached through ordinary user navigation within your site – link pages into and out of one another.Over-cram your drop-down menus with pages, this hinders user-ability.Provide a link to every single page on your website from your homepage – this overloads the page with too many tabs, reduces white space and slows loading time. Google+
Boost Your Job Post’s SEO With These 8 Simple Steps The point of any job posting is obvious: get it in front of as many of the right people as possible. The more of those people you can reach, the better talent pool you’ll be able to pick from and the better chance you’ll have of landing a great person. So, how do you get more of those people to see it? Make Google (and countless other search engines, including job search engines) your friend by making sure your postings are as search-engine optimized (SEO) as possible. Here are eight super-easy tips on how to do that: 1. We get it - you want to be fun and exciting and have catchy job titles like digital overlord, legal ninja or digital prophet. Thats because very few people are going to search “chief chatter” instead of "call center manager" or “dream alchemist” instead of "head of creative." 2. Building off that point, you want to have the title of the job as search-friendly as possible (i.e. director of marketing) and put it high in the posting, along with the location. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
SEO Bullshit (And How to Avoid Stepping In It) I’m NOT calling SEO bullshit. I’m not saying you don’t need to understand SEO. You do. And when you do, search will become a leading ingredient in your marketing mix and possibly the largest source of traffic to your website. (Psst… I simplified it for you here.) I’m not saying you shouldn’t do SEO. I’m not saying you shouldn’t hire SEO professionals. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re still wondering… Why the harsh title for this post? I gave this post the title “SEO Bullshit” because we’re all up to our earballs in misinformation about the topic. SEO BS is on your screen. Bullshit gets reduced to birdshit in your Twitter feed. SEO BS is on your bookshelf. SEO BS is in your inbox. My daily SEO offers come from a gmail address, so I can’t quickly research the companies. Sometimes the rules don’t apply Check this out, a little exercise in search… You see what I searched for. Both the second and third results are brief, lightweight pages. Know why? We have the BS-SEOs to thank BS detectors
How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag (Our 4-Step Process) Most people think title tags are pretty straightforward. There’s no way you can mess them up, right? Or is there? The truth is, title tags have more potential (and SEO value) than most people realize. For example, take a look at these two title tags: Here’s what happened to our organic traffic when we changed our Rank Tracker title tag from the former to the latter: That’s an increase of ~37%! Sidenote. We realize there are many variables at play here. In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about SEO Title tags. Let’s get started. What are SEO titles tags? A title tag is the HTML element used to specify the title of a webpage. Here’s how it looks in its raw form: Its primary job is to tell visitors and search engines what they can expect from the web page (in the shortest and most concise way possible). But because title tags typically show up in the SERPs… And when a page/post is shared on social media… Here are a couple more reasons why title tags are important: As correlation !
4 SEO Data Reports You Haven't Looked at In a While (and Should) We marketers are drowning in a sea of metrics. We have more numbers, statistics, analytics, percentages, pie charts, line graphs, and data crunching than we know what to do with. Why in the world am I going to tell you to look at four more? Here’s why. I don’t have a problem with traffic numbers, conversion rates, or KPIs. 1. Site speed is one of the most fundamental of all website metrics. I think that site speed is one of the most important indicators of a site’s health and performance. By noticing and then improving your site speed, you can gain a major advantage both with your search optimization and more conversions. The Challenge of Calculating Site Speed Site speed is a slippery metric. Google PageSpeed Insights, for example, may deliver a different page speed score from Pingdom, which is different from GTMetrix. Here’s the report from GTMetrix — 1.94s. And here’s the report from Pingdom — 1.38s. Does this mean we shouldn’t trust site speed reports? How to get this report 2. 3. 4.
Google Analytics UTM tagging best practices Google Analytics is by far the most used analytics tool. BuiltWith estimates that more than 80% of all websites worldwide use Google Analytics for measuring their website usage. Unfortunately, many of the people relying on Google Analytics for measuring their website traffic lack a good understanding of how it works and have not set it up correctly. This article focuses on how to ensure the traffic you acquire to your site shows up correctly in Google Analytics. How Google Analytics knows where your visitors come from When a person visits your website their browser reads the underlying HTML and CSS code in order to know what to show in the browser. For example, on website A there is a link to website B: Source = Medium = referral This is probably something you’ve seen in the Google Analytics interface before. Google Analytics dimensions Google Analytics thinks of incoming visits in terms of a few dimensions. Source Medium Campaign Term (none)
How to Improve the Speed of Your WordPress Site With internet connections getting faster and faster every year, you would expect that optimizing the speed of your website would become less of a priority. That is not the case. If your website does not load within a few seconds, most people will simply lose interest. Search engines have been heavily pushing for more lightweight websites over the last few years. In this article, I would like to show you five ways in which you can reduce the size of your website pages and speed up the load times and give your visitors a better browsing experience. Before you apply any of the suggestions detailed in this article, I recommend testing the speed of your website using a benchmarking service such as GTMetrix, Pingdom Tools or Google PageSpeed. 1. Plugins are the reason why the WordPress platform is so flexible. There are a number of ways in which a plugin can slow down your website: 2. Modern website designs are generally quicker than the table based designs that were used years ago. 3. 4. 5.