I don't know why, but people often ask questions like "If you were to do one thing only, what would it be?". As if it is possible to achieve something serious by doing only one thing. But anyway, let me rise to the challenge of the-one-thing question applied to search engine optimization of a site, i.e. an on-site SEO.
If I were allowed to do only one thing to implement onsite search engine optimization to a website, what would it be? I guess people who ask this question are really good at setting priorities. So lets see.
Assuming you already have a website with substantial amount of unique content and organic back links, and if you were going to do only one SEO thing, then I would recommend optimizing your Page Title tags. The Page Title tag is undoubtedly the most important tag for SEO.
When optimizing your Page Title tag, ensure that you include your company name in it, but not necessarily as the first item. Remember, SEO like anything else in life is hierarchical in nature, so the first few characters are more important than the last few.
Optimizing Page Title Tag for SEO in Joomla
Let's take a look at a real life example. I have a website design branch of my company - Joomla Bliss. Together with my two technical gurus we produce professional websites using pre-made Joomla templates, which we customize and upgrade to adjust to our clients' requirements. This approach allows us to offer a highly cost-effective solution without sacrificing quality. Most of our clients are from the Ottawa area.
First I created many pages with web related content, describing our services, offering tips and resources. At the same time, we conducted a few link building, online PR and Social Marketing campaigns - all with the goal of getting quality back links. Those two things are a given.
Then, given that Joomla Bliss is using Joomla, we installed a script that allows us to generate dynamic Page Title tags and add the desired keywords to them. This script parses the Article (i.e. File) name into the Page Title tag, so each tag becomes unique and is not duplicated.
Here is our Page Title tag model:
"Article Name" plus "Website Design Ottawa" plus "Joomla Bliss" (our company name) plus "Our most desired keywords"
So as the result, for our main website design page, we have the following Page Title tag:
"Website Design - Website Design Ottawa / Joomla Bliss / Joomla web design for small business"
To see this Page Title tag in action, go to our website design page and point your curser to the browser tab you would have open for this page.
Optimizing Page Title Tags without a Content Management System
If you are not using a content management system (CMS), you can simply go to the source code of your HTML and add Page Title tags manually. In my old SEO Ottawa website, which was built years ago and does not use a CMS, this is exactly what I did. I added the following Page Title tag to my Home page:
<title>SEO Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Helping You Attract Customers through Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)</title>
And for all other pages, I added the same tag but modified its elements slightly to reflect the contents of each particular page. There is quite a bit of manual work, but it pays off greatly! So there you have it, if you were to do one thing only for SEO, you should optimize your Page Title tags.
