Some of us remember the pre-Google days when computers were primarily used to process data. If we needed information, the library was pretty much our only option. Thank goodness for the modern era and search engines like Google that instantaneously locate any information we need. Businesses don’t always understand how Google puts together that search results page (or why their company isn’t ranked #1 on it) but they should know that Google’s approach to website rankings is, ironically, similar to the way librarians shelve books.
Think of Google as a cyberlibrarian, in charge of properly categorizing millions of websites not only by subject, but by order of importance. When a website is launched, it is like a book being delivered to the librarian for shelving. Just as a book needs to be on the right “shelf” in a library to be found, your website needs to be placed appropriately in Google search results. In the library, if we can’t find the book we’re looking for, we often choose the next best thing. The same holds true in the online world. We need to make your site easy to find and first available. How? With optimized title tags.
Most SEO experts consider title tags to be the most important SEO tool to optimize for success with Google. In fact, many businesses have jumped in the rankings just by changing their title tags alone. Your title tag is similar to the title on the spine of the book. Google crawls the tag for keywords and gives it great weight in ranking your site, just as a librarian uses a book title to shelve the book. Each of your inner pages should also have a properly search engine optimized title tag. In other words, the cyberlibrarian considers the spine of your book (the site title tag) and also the names of each chapter (the title tag of each inner page) when “shelving” or “ranking” your site.
If you don’t know what your title tags are for each page on your site, it’s easy to find out. Look at the web browser at the top of your page. Below are two examples of website title tags. The first could use some SEO power since there are no searchable keywords in the title tag.
Holland CPA is a title tag optimization success story. They were unranked for their preferred keyword, “Naperville CPA” until they turned to our Naperville web design company to strategically add it to the title tags on their site. They quickly jumped to #3 on the Google search results page.
Title tags are just one way to improve your search engine optimization. Check your title tags and if you need help optimizing them, give us a call to schedule a free consultation, including an evaluation of your site. Remember, the easier you make the cyberlibrarian’s job, the easier you will be found on the internet!
If you’d like Google to make your website the top book in the library, Design & Promote can help. Contact us today for a Free SEO Consultation.