1. Use Unique Long Tail Titles + Content on Every Page (drop the site title!)
In highly competitive markets, generic title tags just don’t get it done anymore. Title tags are the most important element that the Search Engines look at to identify and categorize your page, thereby determining your competition and your position in the search engines.
Get rid of these types of titles: “My Company – Buy Blue Widgets at My Company Cheap”
There are several problems with this;
1. Using ‘My Company’ over and over again on every page may have been what someone told you was the best way, or best practices, but when it comes to search engines it looks like duplicate content. In these days when search engines are not really putting much weight on Meta tags and descriptions, the title is the first thing that they look at and is critically important to ranking.
2. Second, the title is loaded with too many words. It washes down the primary keywords.
3. Lastly, it targets too many keywords, unless you have built enough pages on the website to also create a single page for ‘cheap blue widgets’. (Which, on a side note, I highly recommend) But in your initial SEO rework of your site and its structure, start small and build your way forward. Later I’ll tell you about keyword research and its importance in this technique, and you will have a roadmap to follow using both. Too many keywords will dilute the benefits of the important ones.
The way this title should be structured is like this; Buy Blue Widgets
Add a ‘buffer-word’ before your keyword set.
Now let’s talk about the reasoning behind why this is the preferred method for search engines.
End-users are becoming more and more educated about how search engines work; the more descriptive words they use, the more likely they are to get the results that they are looking for. What this means is that last year the key phrase for My Company was Debt Help. This year their top key phrase is Get Debt Free. I don’t know why, maybe there is a major company out there doing massive debt consolidation ad campaigns that have “coined” this phrase to make it more memorable than debt help. Who knows? The point is that they are using a completely different search phrase, and the phrase is 3 words rather than 2 words in length. This makes the need to build individual pages for your primary keywords, then your niche keyword phrases, and then finally for your long-tail phrases. Generally speaking, the lower number of words the better, has been the overall suggested recommendation to target because human nature is the path of least resistance. To a point it still is, but the people using longer phrases (based on extensive analytics), know what they are looking for, because they convert at a significantly higher rate.
Once I have identified these phrases I start building additional pages, or even microsites (for purposes of A/B, funnel, and conversion testing) and I target the 3, 4, 5 or even 6 word long-tail phrases.
Use these longer keyword phrases within your content as well. If possible, replace enough of the current keywords on good ranking pages with the niche and longtail version of the keyword string. So if you are ranking well for ‘blue widgets’, add ‘cheap’ to each instance of ‘blue widgets’, both on-page and in the code. This method can be used on several plains. Use it to transfer page rank or boost a niche phrase, while the original rank for blue widgets remains. (You may see a temporary slip in your rankings, but this is only temporary)
If you are in a highly competitive market, this could be the answer that you are looking for to attract the middle 40-80% target audience, plus get great conversion rates.
Tomorrow - #2 Learn and Utilise Advanced Keyword Selection
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