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SEO Tips: Part 36 – Optimizing Post Title for Search Engines

ashish — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:46:39 +0000

In this post, we talk about how the Title of the Post is something that needs a lot of careful attention. Till the time that I learnt how to be effective about the title of a post, I used to use large post titles, something that I learnt could be a waste of effort, and in some cases, could cause a penalty from the search engines (related to keyword stuffing). Let me provide an example from this post itself. If I was using my previous process of defining the title of a post, the post would have the following title “Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 36 – Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. I used to think that the more descriptive a post title along with keywords in it, the better would the reception in the search engines. And I knew about keyword stuffing, and how search engines are using penalties for such stuffing rather than getting the user the benefit that they expect.
So, what is it about the title of a post ?
Well, most search engines look only at the first 60 characters of the title of a post, and ignore whatever comes after that. So if you consider the alternative lengthy title that was there in the previous paragraph, the search engines would have ignored the actual title of the post, which came near the end “Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. Instead, the first part of the title, dealing with Optimization Tips and Tricks would have been used by the search engines, and we know how hotly contested those keywords are. Instead, by changing the post title, it is more likely that users searching specifically for why the post title is important for SEO would find your post, and they would also find the content valuable.
Next, if you look at the earlier proposed title, it contains the keywords ‘Search Engine’ 3 times. This is an absolute no-no, since search engines are getting much more efficient about penalizing sites that seem to do keyword stuffing, and this case would have fallen right into that bracket. Why take that chance, especially when you are not likely to get any benefits from this. And then the title is so long that it would get wrapped in many instances, especially if people are looking up search results from mobile phones and tablets, and likely to make it more difficult to read. You want people to be quickly able to read the title of your post when the search engines display a long list of search results, so that it is more likely that they will come to your site.
So, if you want your post to have a higher chance of being picked up in search engine results and also being selected by users peering through a whole page of search results, learn how to optimize the title of your post. Trust me, it will be well worth it, especially since the effort required is very minimal.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 7

ashish — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:07:39 +0000

The previous post (optimizing sections inside your post structure) talked about some assorted steps you can to optimize your post (such as permalinks, bread crumbs (example, the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin), speeding up your site, and so on).
This post looks at optimizing the images on your site for better SEO. I can just hear some of you saying, Huh ! Why do we need to do something for images. Well, consider that Google Image Search drives a large number of people (on one of my blogs, it drives more than 70% of visitors, and this is not a photo blog), and Google, when displaying search results, many times shows images as a part of the search results, right near the top. If you were able to get your blog in there through some image optimization, would it not be worth it ? Well, if you are convinced, here goes:
- Number one item, you should ensure that all your images have an ‘Alt’ tag filled out properly. A search engine cannot read the image, and can only find out what the image is by the alt tag, and by the context in which the image appears. And of course, you earn credit from some visitors who are visually challenged and use these tags to figure out what the image wants.
- If you are not able to add ‘Alt’ tag properties / text to your images manually, make sure that they are not blank. Use a plugin such as the ‘SEO Friendly Images’ (link – automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes).
- This one is more speculative, but it is believed that if you host your image on a popular image sharing platform such as Picasa Web or Flickr, then you get a slight boost to your SEO rankings for the image.
- If possible, ensure that your images are in a separate folder that is accessible by search engines
- Don’t put too many images per page, so if you load 100 or so images, then it is taken negatively
- Make sure that you change the image file names that come from the camera and make it something distinctive. Don’t use something like P121765.jpg, instead make it something ‘Photo of Sydney Opera House from water level’. This helps in search engine ranking and gives a boost to the image ranking
- Now, something that is different. Look at the words surrounding a photo / picture, and make sure that the photo or picture sits in a section of text that describes it some degree and has some keywords in it. This also boost the ability of the Search engines image search crawler to rank the images higher.
- If somebody requests you for being able to use your photos or a thumbnail of your photos, then consider whether the photo is exclusive enough. If you feel that it is fine to do so, ensure that there is a link to your original blog post under the photo in the other site, since this helps in giving your link popularity a boost.
- When you are giving a link to your photos somewhere, don’t use the words ‘link’ or ‘click here’, instead use descriptive text as the anchor since doing this naming also helps in SEO
- Ensure that your photos have a standard aspect ratio, since search engines show thumbnails and these thumbnails are easier to show when they are of a standard size.

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Keep your title of the blog as long as possible – for social networking tools

ashish — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:28:46 +0000

I have always believed in keeping the titles of my blog posts short and sweet, but then I started discovering something. I have an automatic process using Twitterfeed to update my blog posts to my Twitter account, and using Networked Blogs to update my Facebook Fan Page. On Twitter, what I found was that with my short beautiful title, only that much amount of the title was showing via the Tweet. Now, this is configurable, and you can set for the update to pick up the following text of the post if the title proves inadequate, but considering that people can find your blog post via Twitter search, and many more services which pick up Twitter posts, you should work to make sure that you have a title that looks sharp, and yet has enough text in it such that it can get picked up from Twitter posts. Craft your title so that on reading it, somebody can immediately see it as the answer to their question.
For example, if you consider the above title, the blog title could have been “Benefits of keeping a long title”, but I decided to keep a longer version of the title, as you can see above. When this shows up on Twitter and Facebook, somebody viewing it can immediately make out that the need for this title is because of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Now, to get the exact correct title everytime that also contains the desired keywords will take some time and effort, and I am ready to make the required effort, it it means that I am able to get a title that causes benefits in terms of users coming to my blog from Twitter search. Usage of Twitter is only increasing, and it is better to spend time to learn about how to optimize ones usage of Twitter.