Thursday, March 17, 2016

What's in a title?



Title Inforgraphic


The title tag <title> in your HTML page is more useful that you thought. The jury is still out there if it is a great factor for ranking on google search. Irrespective, it is in a way the very first customer touchpoint for your website. Title gives you an opportunity to grab customer eyeballs, and hopefully give you that click. 

Here are a few guidelines to stick by:

1. Don't let your title go into the ".... zone".
Google allocates about 488-489 pixels for the title on the search page. Which comes to around 55-60 chars. Any spill over, google converts it to a series of dots. So why not just stick to the limit.

2. Keyword is really the key.
A few years ago, google would highlight the keywords in the title too, so it made sense to stuff your title with keywords then. But it doesn't do so now. The title still needs to be relevant to the search phrase. Simple rule I believe that will not go out of style is, draft your title to reflect the content of your page.

3. Use Title Case for title, duh!
Title Case, in case you were wondering, is when (almost) every word in your sentence starts with a capital letter.
So This is How it Would Look Like to be in a Title.
Or maybe this
So This Is How It Would Look Like To Be In A Title.
Capitalising words draws attention to them and more likely to be clicked.

Monday, February 29, 2016

Learning Resources for SEO

Armed with Google, I present to you the free learning resources that I will be counting on to help me understand the nuts and bolts of SEO.



GoogleBot
If we're talking about search here, then Google has to be the first thing that comes to mind. Google wants, even more than, it's users to find the right results for their searches. So it seems fit to start with them. Here's a link to their SEO Starter Guide.
Webmaster Central Blog is a good place for news on crawling and indexing sites for Google Index.



MOZ SEO
All searches on SEO lead to MOZ. It is impossible not to hit a MOZ link during your research on this subject.
They have an easy to follow beginners guide to get you started. Do check out their videos on MOZ Academy.




PS: Make sure you're reading current information. Google's search algorithm is a notorious ever evolving creature.

A few more learning resources.

quicksprout Search Engine LandWordtracker