“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!