It is important to optimize your web page’s title, both for visitors, but also for search engines. Having a relevant, and optimized page title can greatly improve your pages ranking and therefore increase your web site traffic.

Rule 1) Don’t leave the title blank
This is a fundamental, but it should be stressed. Leaving your page title blank massively inhibits your chances of getting high rankings. Even today, you may see some sites where the title simply says “Mozilla Firefox” or “Microsoft Internet Explorer” – by this, you know that the web designer hasn’t specified a title. Always make sure you specify a page title on each page - search engines prefer pages with titles that include relevant, descriptive keywords for the page content.

Rule 2) Always keep the title relevant to the content
Having a title that is completely unrelated to the content is a blackhat SEO method that some people use to attempt to get more traffic from search engines – using popular keywords in the page title, even if the actual site is unrelated to the specified title. Not only may your site be penalized by search engines if they discover that you are doing this simply to mislead people, but it actually means you won’t be receiving any quality traffic either. Instead, people will come to your site expecting something similar to the page title, and as soon as they see the site isn’t about that topic, they’ll leave. In fact, people actually looking for your site may find it harder if the title isn’t what they are expecting it to say! Read the rest of this entry »

When redirecting a visitor from one page or address page on your site to another, it is important to also bear in mind the effect this will have with search engines. Not all redirect methods are search engine-friendly, so to make sure that the search engines find the new page, and that any “link juice” from the old page is carried on to the new one, make your redirects SEO friendly.

As a general rule of thumb, the redirect should take place server-side, rather than client side. While client-side methods exist, such as meta-refreshes or Javascript redirecting, search engines often ignore these and will continue to cache the old page, rather than the new one. While visitors will see the new page, search engines might not.

A server-side redirect means that the new page is fetched on the server and sent directly to the client (in this case the search engine bot) in place of the old page – the search engine doesn’t get to see the old page anymore, even if visiting the old page’s URL. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since businesses started using the internet, Search Engine Optimisation (S.E.O.) has been constantly evolving to maximise the benefits from online marketing. SEO is a branch of online marketing, focusing on improving how a site is seen in search engines and helping to boost the number of visitors that a web site receives from a search engine. Of course, there are a number of common mistakes made when trying to optimise a site for search engines:

Using images where plain text is more appropriate

This is both an accessibility and SEO mistake for obvious reasons. Search engines cannot read text displayed in images, so using images or backgrounds composed mostly of text, instead of plain text, just for aesthetic purposes can be seen as a mistake. This does not always pose a problem where the text in the image is non-essential, but many designers continue to design a site in a graphical program such as Photoshop, then just splice (cut up and stick back together) in a web browser. The effect is usually not noticeable to an end user, until they try to highlight some of the text on the page and realise it’s an image. For disabled users, e.g. a blind or partially sighted user, the page may be completely unusable as their text-to-speech software will not be able to read out the text in the images, unless alternative text is specified.  Read the rest of this entry »