A page title is the very first thing a person sees in the search results. It is vital that the page title accurately reflects the content of that page.

For example, my contact page is titled “Contact Information for High Aspirations, Inc.” which makes it very clear exactly what a visitor can expect to find on that page of my site.

High Aspirations, Inc. includes page titles when designing and maintaining a website, but clients should check them and let us know if they’d like any updates.

Websites and pages that haven’t been updated in months or years may need a new title as search engine optimization methods have changed!

Making sure your pages titles tell visitors what they can expect to find there is an easy search engine optimization task!

Tags: search engine optimization, SEO

Clients and business associates often ask me for tips on how to write blog posts and articles. I try to explain that it is hard to find a balance between the search engines you want to visit and the human readers you need to impress enough to get them to return and hopefully, one day, make that next crucial step of purchasing your product or service.

I always say that I prefer to write for humans because if you’re writing about your product/service/whatever, your expertise will show in your writing and the keywords and phrases will be there and you won’t have to plan it or work hard for it to happen.

I recently read a very good article on Website Magazine entitled Captivating Readers While Attracting Web Crawlers by Michelle Wicmandy.

Ms. Wicmandy agrees with me, but says it much more poetically:

Writing is the portal to our thoughts, and if we write in snippets, our thoughts will be just as abbreviated. To keep your content interesting and hold the reader’s attention; write to the reader, write for the reader and write from the heart. Write as if you’re talking with a friend — or at least someone representative of your readership. Engage the reader with stories and compelling information, not just short little blurbs.

I suggest everyone read the article. It really does offer some good suggestions and I’m not just saying that because the author agrees with me!

Tags: blog, keyword phrases, keywords, marketing, search engine optimization, SEO

Effective immediately, clients whose maintenance agreements include Search Engine Reports, will no longer receive the Linking Sites Overview report.

The Linking Sites Overview report gave an overview of sites linking to your web site (backlinks). As a result of changes made by Google and other engines to limit the number of backlinks that are displayed via the link: command, this report has been showing less and less information each month. Some reports have even been completely blank. The engines want users to sign up for their respective webmaster tools which, to date, do not allow our reporting software to pull data.

To replace the above mentioned report, we will begin sending you the Site Inbound Links Analysis which shows the number of web pages that contain links to yours.

We will continue to test the Linking Sites Overview reporting and if reliable data returns, we will again run the report on our clients’ maintenance schedules.

If you don’t currently receive any search engine reporting, but would like to, just contact us.

Tags: Google