Title Tags for Web Pages

One of the things that many people overlook when creating their web site is coming up with good title tags.

First let me make sure we are on the same page. A title tag is the title of the page that appears at the very top of the browser window. For example, if you visit www.microsoft.com, you’ll probably see “Microsoft Corporation – Mozilla Firefox” or “Microsoft Corporation – Internet Explorer”, depending on your choice of web browser.

Now for Microsoft, that might be all you need. But for us little guys, we need to let the world know what it is that we do. Visit EduCyber.com and you’ll see the title “Denver Web Site Design, Internet Marketing, Web Hosting, Denver Search Engine Optimization.” Note that the name of the company doesn’t appear in the title. Instead we have let people know what it is that we do here at EduCyber.com.

Also, if you click on a link, such as the link to this blog, you’ll see that the blog page has a different title. The title here is “Search Engine Tips, Internet Marketing and Web Design: EduCyber blog”. Yes we have used the company name but notice that it doesn’t come first. Also note that every page on your web site should have a different title.

It appears, from a brief visit around the web site that a lot of companies want their site to be ranked high for “Welcome!”. You can often find Welcome in the title of web pages as well as having it be the first word of text on the main page of the web site. Do a search at Google for Welcome and see what I’m talking about.

What should you do? Write a list (10 – 50) of key phrases that you should be ranked for. Choose the two or three most important ones for the title of the main page. Look at the various pages of your site and craft a different title for each from your key phrases. Then do a search. Are you listed? If not wait a week and try again. This isn’t the end all to Search Engine Optimization but it can be one factor to help you get listed.

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Web Site Usability Testing

Have you ever tested your web site to see if it actually works? We’ve seen some beautifully designed web sites that just don’t work. This goes back, in part to my last blog on having a Call to Action on each page. But it also goes beyond that. Once you have a call, you have to determine if people can actually accomplish it.

A couple of years ago, we decided that since we want people to call us, we should move our phone number from being buried in the footer of the page up to shouting it in the header. Within a week I had confirmation from a new customer that having the phone number up high and large helped us land the job. That’s mean by web site usability testing. Can people actually do what you want them to do?

We ran a Pay Per Click campaign for a customer for awhile. He wasn’t getting the desired results (more sales as it is an ecommerce site). We were getting him more clicks to the correct page but when we looked at the page, we saw that the “Buy Now” button was way down on the page, after a long list of products. People – CUSTOMERS – weren’t buying because they couldn’t figure out how to do so.

A great way to think about web site usability testing is Steve Krug’s favorite line: “Don’t Make Me Think!”. If visitors to your web site have to think, they’ll likely go away. If, on the other hand, the next step is obvious, they’ll likely take it.

So take a minute and go through your site, or better yet, get a real live customer to go through your site. Ask them if it makes sense to do whatever it is that you want them to do. If you want a real professional look at your web site, we can conduct a usability test but you can do a lot of testing on your own.

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Create a Call to Action

We build a lot of web sites. We also rebuild a lot of web sites. And I can tell you that a lot of web sites don’t have a clear focus. A well-designed web site needs to have a clearly defined call to action for each and every page.

There might be several different calls to action on a site. Perhaps on the main page the call to action is to simply click a given link to learn more about a specific service or product. For interior pages of a web site, one of the most common mistakes I hear from web site owners is “The goal of this page is to inform or educate the visitor”. That, in itself, isn’t a bad goal but there still must be a call to action after the educating has been done. A simple “to learn more, call us at 555 555-5555” then gives the visitor something concrete to do after they’ve been informed.

You’ve seen or heard good calls to action on TV and radio. Call now. Operators are standing by. Call in the next 20 minutes for a special discount. Visit us on the web at . . . All of these are calls to action. For ecommerce web sites, the calls are much clearer. Add to Cart, Buy Now, Checkout, Details, etc.

You can have a variety of different calls depending on the purpose and scope of the site and of the individual page. Some good calls to action include:

Request to call
Add to cart / Buy now
Fill out this form
Email us
Complete a survey
Create a registration
Provide your info in order to be entered in a drawing
Become a member and we’ll give you more information

As you can see, there are many choices and ways you can craft your call to action. Go back and take a look at your web site. Do you have a clear call to action on each page?

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Make Your Site the Centerpiece

One of the most unusual aspects of a company having a web site is that the site can be a great marketing tool for the business but that site needs its own marketing plan (which should dovetail with a bigger company marketing campaign).

If you set your web site as the centerpiece of your marketing, there are a few simple steps you should take to make sure you get the most from it:

Print it on EVERYTHING. Every piece of printed material that your company generates should have your web address (URL) on it. This includes:
- Brochures
- Business Cards
- Letterhead

and even:

Invoices

Proposals

Contracts

Let people hear it. If a caller is sent to voicemail, make sure they know they can also contact you on the web at www.yourdomain.com. If your phone system lets you control what people hear while on hold, make sure your message comes out there and that it mentions your web site.
Another easy to take step that is too often overlooked is your email signature. Every email program lets you have an automatic email signature. Make sure you include your web site address in the signature.

These are just three easy steps you can use to help you market your web site.

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Google Knows Everything

It was bound to happen. Google officially knows everything. They have indexed more than ONE TRILLION web pages. They announced this stunning bit of information last Friday on their official blog. If they’ve indexed that much, they must know everything, right?

Much is made of Google and the information they bring to your fingertips with just a touch of a key or click of a mouse. But just like a teenager or earlier 20’s college graduate, they’ve got a lot of knowledge but not a lot of wisdom. “Knowing” lots of stuff and understanding what to do with it is a different matter. Take, for example, the valid complaints of SEO Expert Aaron Wall. In recent blog posts he has complained that ads on his Gmail account have been trying to entice him to date lonely married women because the content of his emails have been about his happy married life as he is a newlywed. Another complaint he had was about a new Google site that, simply because it is a Google property, trumps others sites in search.

I’ve taken to re-using my favorite Spiderman quote “With great power comes great responsibility.” when dealing with this issue. Google has been a tremendous success. They have built a powerful search engine that has changed the way we communicate and get information. They were definitely in the right place in the right time with the right idea. But as they have grown, they have tended to rely to heavily on their content (their knowledge) and not used wisdom to use this content in a manner that is healthy and consistent with copyright ownership.

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Stay Organized and Stay Productive

We’ve been giving and receiving Outlook training this week and it hit me how important it is to stay focused with productivity tools of which Outlook continues to be one of our most important. In an office environment, using Outlook as the front end to an exchange server gives lots of opportunities for sharing schedules, assigning tasks, sharing calendars, and storing emails in public folders so that others in the company can easily access the same information.

Outlook 2007 is a powerful tool whether in a business environment with Exchange server or as a standalone program. The search component in particular is powerful. I have on my Outlook Favorites the search folders Unread Mail and For Followup. You can also add particular category searches that help you to stay connected and keep moving forward. The To-Do bar on the right side of the screen is a handy tool that you can expand or hide to meet your needs but when expanded shows your upcoming schedule and flagged emails.

Another productivity tool that I use in conjunction with Outlook is Jott. I’ve written about Jott previously but it is a great time saver if you’re out and about a lot. I can call Jott to send myself emails, ask for reminders that will come to my phone and email, or send an email to anyone in my address book. Yes, from my phone. So when I’m driving down the road and remember that I need to confirm an appointment via email, I can call (using my hands free bluetooth device of course) and tell Jott to send an email to Ted, letting him know that I’ll be at the breakfast meeting on Friday and Ted will get the email.

Between Outlook, Exchange and Jott, I manage to stay organized and on top of my schedule and keep my productivity high.

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5 Key Web Site Statistics

There are five key web site statistics that every web site owner should pay close attention to:

How many visitors? People used to get all excited about hits but you could easily have 100 hits from one visitor. The number of visitors though (usually tracked by unique IP addresses) gives you a really good idea of whether you’re getting the kind of traffic you need.
What pages are people looking at? If you don’t know what’s popular on your site, you don’t know how to make it better. If a page other than your home page is more popular, you might have managed to get it ranked well in the search engines – another good thing to know.
What search engines are sending people to your site and how many are they sending? With Google fielding around 75% of ALL searches, you typically get the most visits from Google. If you’re not, you can learn why and determine whether that is a good thing or not.
What terms people are searching for when they get to your site? If you sell computers and find that people are searching for hair spray when they click through to your site, you’ve got a problem. If on the other hand, they are searching for motherboard, that is a good thing.
What other sites are linking to your site? Google (and other search engines) love it when other sites are linking to your site. So the more sites that link to you, the better – at least if they’re the right kind of links.

You need to know these statistics to make informed decisions about your site. Do you know these?

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Taming the Inbox: Managing Volumes of Email

I’ve done it! I’ve taken a huge step towards taming my inbox. For years it has had no fewer than 300 messages in it and when busy-ness hits, it regularly balloons to over 1500 messages.

Until now. What is the secret to taming your email? you may ask. The answer is so simple (once you know the answer it always seems simple): Right now, as I write, I have 13 emails in my inbox. Each of them is something that will be dealt with within the next business day and then filed away.

When there were 300+ emails in there, it was so easy to let it balloon up to 400 or 600 or more. With 0 to 20 in there, its very easy to identify what needs to be done, do it and then file it. The biggest thing that worked for me was opening a Word document so that when I started through the laborious process of whittling down 1100 emails to 5, I could jot a note about something that needed to be done.

So, it worked like this: file, file, file, delete, file, delete, delete, oh, I need to call Frank about this one. Hmm should I quit working on filing which isn’t fun or should I call Frank? This time I mastered the urge to bail and made a note to call Frank in the Word Document. Then back to file, delete, file, file, delete, delete, delete.

It took six to eight hours to do this but I finished over the weekend and this has been one of the most productive weeks I’ve ever had and its only Thursday!

So if you are stuck in email purgatory, set aside the time, ignore every distraction, and file, categorize and make notes until you’re down to 0. Right now I’ve got 9 items in my inbox, the oldest of which dates back to 5:20 PM on Tuesday. Ohh, that feels good

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Google Doesn’t Play Fair

Imagine, if you will, going to the doctor for an exam. After the exam, the doctor tells you the grave news that you must have an operation immediately, the exam results show a problem. But when you ask what the problem is, the good doctor gives you a medical book and says that your problem is definitely one of the problems in there.

That’s pretty much what I feel like right now. Yesterday I was showing a potential client how to find my site in Google when I noticed a new link on the results that says “This site may harm your computer”. Trying to go www.educyber.com brings up an intermediate page warning of hell and damnation if you do visit my site.

I’ve gone to Google and to the site they work with, www.stopbadware.org and I get messages saying “Read the guidelines” but no indication of why they have made it nearly impossible to get to my site. My only recourse is to go through page after page of guidelines to see if there is possibly something I have done to offend.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to stop the bad guys and their nefarious schemes of installing spyware and trojans on computers. But Google’s approach is to say “You’re doing something wrong, stop it immediately.” and then not tell you what the problem is. Married guys have probably experienced the same frustration but this is effecting my bottom line!

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Twitter, Tweet, Twilight

Today, as the twilight settled round me on a cloudy and cool eve, I turned to my new favorite hobby, I tweeted my friends on twitter. When you connect with friends and send a message, you’ve just tweeted. Sure glad they didn’t call it tooting.

Twitter is fun. Take the ability to send text messages to your friends and colleagues and mix it together with newsletter blasts and you begin to grasp the thrill of Twitter. Add to it the skill of writing haiku and you get even closer. Twitter is a hybrid web appication texting application found at www.twitter.com.

I use it to connect with friends and colleagues in ministry. I also use it for business to stay on top of what gurus in the field are all about. For example, I can track Rev. Joe Burnham at www.twiter.com/joeburnham. I can follow Search Engine Optimization guru Aaron Wall at www.twitter.com/aaronwall. Follow all the tips for riding a wave of publicity at www.twitter.com/publicityhound.

Want to learn more? Sign up and follow me at www.twitter.com/edubrian.

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Title Tags for Web Pages

Web Site Usability Testing

Create a Call to Action

Make Your Site the Centerpiece

Google Knows Everything

Stay Organized and Stay Productive

5 Key Web Site Statistics

Taming the Inbox: Managing Volumes of Email

Google Doesn’t Play Fair

Twitter, Tweet, Twilight

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