When I write a blog I like to attempt to add some fun activities or tidbits of information here and there – it makes things interesting. What is today’s activity you ask?

Go to Google and type in “Untitled Document”. How many results do you get? I got 44,500,000 search results and I have no doubts that you got more.

As Leigh mentioned in his 'SEO for small business' post, title tags are very important for the search engine optimization of a website. Websites get launched daily without title tags. This is often due to forgetfulness or bad habits on the web developer’s part. Could be a result of being rushed too. When a new HTML document is created, most of the time using templates, it includes a title tag of “Untitled Document”.

No matter what you’re selling, advertising, or wanting users to see, getting anywhere near to #1 under any keywords with an untitled document is not likely to happen and your target users are not going to find you.

Title tags aren't just for search engines either. They are viewed by your website visitor in a few prominent places:

• text that appears within the blue bar at the top of a browser window.
• On browser tabs, the title is also what appears in the tab.
• When a website visitor minimizes the browser window, the title tag is what is appears.
• The title is also what appears on the first line of search results in the major search engines.

The best SEO practices also keep in mind the benefit for your website visitors. Provided good meaningful title tags will help your visitors, as well as your search engine rankings.

So be free my friends – go and give the gift to yourself of properly named title tags and watch your website climb the rankings in the search engines.

“Help! I don't have much time to optimize! What can I do?”

If you’re a small business owner who also has the lovely task of managing your own website, then you may have found yourself in this situation….you know you need to do some search engine optimization but you just don’t have the time to do it all. Of course the first thing I’m going to tell you is to give us a call and we’ll handle it for you, but let’s say that’s not yet an option.

What I would tell you to do is to take a good hard look at your web page title tags!

What are title tags you ask? In laymen’s terms, title tags are the HTML tags at the top of a web page that tell the browser what the page is about. You know, look up at the very top of the browser window and at the left you’ll see some text about that page; well, that’s the title tag. It serves two main purposes 1) when displayed in the browser it helps human users identify what the page is about, and 2) it gives search engines an indication of what they can expect to find on that page as well.

Good title tags are arguably one of the most important aspects of SEO. Search Engines such as Google place a fair amount of value in these little guys! They are also one of the easiest tactics for people to both comprehend and employ. What is important is that you know which key words are important to your business, as well as which ones are relevant to that particular page. You’ll definitely want to create UNIQUE title tags for EACH page on your web site. Be sure to examine each page’s content carefully so that the title tags are reflective of the content message on the page. Whatever you do don’t put in keywords that are not relevant to the page content. This will not help you, your visitors, or the search engines! Try to include one or two keywords/phrases in each title tag. Remember to keep them fairly short as most search engines only support 50 to 70 characters.

Finally, have a good look at the content on the page and try logically insert these same keywords in to the content. You’ll want to have a nice keyword density on the page. I say 'logically' and 'nice', because you don’t want to overdo it and end up spamming your own web site with keywords. Just let it come naturally.

Of course there are dozens of more incredible things that you can do to improve your search engine optimization, such as inbound linking, page renaming and alt tags to name a few, but if you’re strapped for time and budget, you can’t go wrong with this approach! Good luck!