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When thinking about search engine optimization, the key phrase to think about is your home page’s title tag. If you choose your words carefully, you can make a big impact on getting your site noticed in search engine results for your site’s key themes.

Ensure that your three to four major keywords show up in your title tag. You should start your sentence with the most important, and repeat words throughout a phrase to up the ante. As an example, the title tag for a website offering cheap web designs might read as follows:

Exclude branding and sales pitch from your title tag, even though you may want your own company’s name front and center. Unless you have a brand name to match Coca Cola, people are unlikely to be looking for your site and you’re better off with the most important keywords up front, leaving other spaces on your site to establish your brand name. If your company’s title has keywords in it, those are an exception–as in the case of the our hypothetical Acme Web Design Company, but they may not be the most important words to begin with. At the same time, you should keep your sales pitch to a minimum in your title tag, and stick with the simple terms used to find your product.

Put that term that narrows out your niche or geographical region in your title tag. If you want a place in the top ten or twenty results for “web design,” then you’re got some hard work ahead, but if you’re lucky enough to have Acme Web Design Company in Columbus, Ohio, you might do better than attempting the impossible. You can achieve a high place in your geographical niche with a title tag that looks like “Web Design Columbus Ohio Low Cost Web Design in Columbus Ohio from the Acme Web Design Company”

A long title tag can be a better choice. Some say 70 character is the max length for your title tag but while, only those first 70 show up in a browser’s header, search engine robots read all of them. Those robots won’t penalize you for exceeding 70 characters and you’ll see site in competitive areas taking advantage of those long titles. Write what meets your needs. “You need to get the most important words and phrases in there to explain what products or services you offer.

Even in a very long title tag, you can’t fit all the search words someone might want to use to find your site. You can alternate title tags within your site to work around this problem. Instead of labeling your services page “services” our web design site could go with “low cost, web design services”. “Contact” could be replaced with a header re-emphasizing our company’s geographical location, et cetera. A lot of sites do make this error and use identical title tags on each of the inner pages of a website. Don’t make this mistake this yourself. Use each page’s title to make one more plug for your key words and phrases.

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