Lesson Five – Homepage Title Tag

Hopefully you have now got some keyphrase rich copy produced for your homepage.

Good SEO is about aligning the keyphrases people search for to both your on-page copy and the associated metadata. (Metadata being the behind-the-scenes code the search engines see, but human viewers typically dont).

The most important piece of metadata as far as search engines are concerned is the ‘title’ tag. Its into this tag that you need to position the keyphrases you identified for your homepage.

Firstly, lets look at a well structured title tag from one of the examples we looked at last time – Iobuild. Then we’ll look at your homepage title tag and work out how how to change it.

So, if you go to the iobuild homepage – www.iobuild.co.uk. The simplest way to see the tag is to select the ‘view’ drop down menu in your browser then click on ‘page source’ as below (I use Firefox but if you use Internet Explorer the option is ‘view source’)…..

What you should now see is the code as listed below.
You will see at the top (fifth line down) we have the title tag with the contents …
Garden Offices | Insulated Garden Office Rooms I Garden Offices I Garden Buildings UK | Studios

The important point about this tag is that the main keyphrase targeted -’garden offices’ is right at the beginning of the tag. ‘insulated garden office’ and ‘garden office’ are also important phrases so they appear near the beginning too.

Here are another few examples. Follow the process above to view the title tags and familiarise yourself with what well structured tags look like and work out which keyphrases they are targeting:-

www.noisekiller.co.uk
www.towmasteruk.co.uk
www.aardvarksafaris.co.uk

Then go and look at your own and make a note of it.

Structuring Your Homepage Title Tag

Here are some specific instructions for structuring your title tag:-

1. Include the main keyphrase at the beginning of the tag

2. Have the secondary phrase directly after it. You can use a hyphen or the ‘pipe’ character ( | ) as a seperator. If in doubt look at the three examples directly above.

3. Put your company name at the end of the tag. (So that when people search for your company name your homepage appears)

4. No more than 10 words in total.

5. No unusual characters – stick to alphanumeric plus hyphens, pipes and commas.

6. Use caps for the first letter in each word and lower case for the rest (it needs to look good as it will show up in search results!)

example: Car Soundproofing – Marine Soundproofing, Noisekiller Ltd

One final point – many people conduct searches for local services (around 40%) so you may want to add a geo variable in the mix. This will also be less competitive than the more general phrases so you’ll get ranked more quickly

example: Car Soundproofing – Marine Soundproofing, Noisekiller, Liverpool

This will ensure searches for ‘car soundproofing liverpool’ and ‘marine soundproofing liverpool’ show up in the search results.

If you do this make sure you have the location somewhere within the homepage content also.

If you have any problems or questions please drop me an email and I’ll help you out (jan@janklin.com).

You are now ready to upload your new text content and the title tag for your homepage. Go ahead and do it. The next time google bot comes calling (in a few weeks probably) the results of this activity should be apparent.

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