Creating Effective Page Titles

Posted on Sep 27, 2007 by Jonathan to SEO

One of the most important initial steps in search engine optimization is the creation of a quality title. A title must be functional from two perspectives; 1) the user 2) the spider. For this discussion we will look at the work THAT Agency did with page titles for our client Gran Melia Mexico Reforma, which is one of the finest Mexico City hotels.

Web page titles must meet a few criteria to be truly effective:

1) They must not exceed 64 characters to be fully visible in Google.
2) They must have the most important keywords towards the beginning
3) They must display information that the searcher wants to find

For the home page for Gran Melia Mexico Reforma we chose to go with the title:

Mexico City Resorts|Mexico City Hotels|Gran Melia Mexico Reforma

You will notice a couple of things from this title. First, I put the hotel name at the end of the title. Most searches will be able to figure out what the hotel name is from the URL that will displayed in search engines. Too often company names take up the prime real estate that is the beginning of a page title. I chose to go with Mexico City Resorts, since it is a primary keyword.

You will also notice the use of “piping.” These allow me to add spacing without using up characters. This allows webmasters to get as many valuable terms in without using up the 64 character limit. It also allows for multiple words across piping to be used

Here are some other examples of titles I wrote for this site that use this method. The cross piping terms are linked:

Resorts in Mexico|Vacation Spots|Gran Melia Mexico Reforma

Hotels in Mexico|Resorts Vacation Packages|Mexico Reforma

Mexico Day Spa|Mexico City|Day Spas in Mexico| Spa

Tags: title tags

How to Make your URLs SEO Friendly

Posted on Sep 21, 2007 by Michelle to SEO

It’s common knowledge these days that a site without SEO is a site most often not found within the SERPs. There are quite easy minor “cosmetic” changes that you can do to your site to improve it’s ranking within the search engines. One option that some consider difficult and time-consuming, but quite effective in the long run, is URL rewriting.

There are two reasons for rewriting your URLs. The first is related to Search Engine Optimization. Search Engines are much more at ease with URLs that do not contain long query strings. Clean URLs, allow search engines to differentiate folder names and can also create real links to keywords. Query strings appended to URLs are often considered hindrances when a search engine attempts to index.

Another reason to rewrite your sites URLs is to increase usability to your site’s end users and ease of maintenance for your webmaster. Clean URLs are much easier to remember, rather than URLs that contain a bunch of parameters and characters.

The code of URL rewriting is actually setting a “system” on the host server that will allow it (i.e. the server) to know how to understand the new URL format. When deciding to rewrite the URLs of your site, you will actually mask the dynamic URLs with static ones. So you will be replacing URLs that contain query strings with elements such as “?”, “+”, “&”, “$”, “=”, or “%” will contain the more search engine friendly “/” (slash) element and present themselves in a basic form.
There are some free online/open source tools available to aid in this endeavor.

Free online URL rewriting – http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting/
Open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET – http://www.urlrewriter.net/
Mod_rewrite – http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html

URL Examples:
Dynamic URL: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=3&view=basic (before rewriting)
Static URL: http://www.example.com/3/basic.html (after rewriting)

Tags: urls

Keyword Research

Posted on Sep 14, 2007 by Michelle to SEO

There are 3 main questions you should ask yourself when you first decide to perform SEO on your site and start the process.

1. Relevance: Is this phrase even relevant to your site and its content?
2. Search Frequency: Are people even searching for this phrase?
3. Competition: How competitive is this field? Is it even a feasible target?

Now, to get started…

First: Brainstorm
Sit down with a pen and paper, and just start writing. Create a list of relevant keywords and keyword phrases. At this stage, there are no wrong answers. Write down all keywords that come to your mind, that describe your product. You can then move to your current website and any branding material to pull out keywords that already exist.

Second: Keyword Tool
Now, take that keyword list you generated in your brainstorming session, and insert it into your favorite keyword tool. Internally, we use Word Tracker. This tool will aid you in finding even more keywords based on your base list. It will also give you some semi-accurate information as to frequency of searches vs. competitors.

Third: Search Frequency
Once your keyword list has been given values in regards to Search Frequency, you can scroll through the results and pick out main keyword phrases and secondary keyword phrases. A keyword phrase with 100 searches a month may be perfect as a secondary keyword phrase, but in most cases may not be best as a primary keyword phrase.

Fourth: Compare Competition
After you determine a primary and secondary list based on search frequency, you should then compare the amount of competition that each keyword phrase has competing for it. The lower the number of competitors, the easier it will be to out maneuver them within the SERPs. You can determine your competition’s relevance, by their Page Rank, amount of backlinks and sites optimization for that keyword phrase.

Last, but not least: Choose 1 Main Phrase
It is usually best to focus on one main keyword phrase and build a strong foundation based on that keywords and a bunch of supporting keyword phrases. The amount of keyword phrases you can target is a direct reflection as to the size of your site. The larger your site, the more keyword phrases you can target and optimize for.

Once the Keyword Research phase is done, the fun stuff comes. Go optimize your site!

Tags: keyword research

Open Source CMS or Creating One

Posted on Sep 10, 2007 by Taylor to Technology Trends

Ok, so I have been teetering with the idea of whether using a open-source CMS (Content Management System) or creating one from scratch. Here at THAT Agency we have many clients that we do constant maintenance for their content, SEO and more. So when do we as developers feel the need to actually create a private label standardized CMS instead of the plethora of open-source one’s currently available on the market.

One place i found with a ton of open source Content Management System applications was ta da www.opensourcecms.com This site breaks down many of today’s CMS applications and shows you their features; even side by side comparisons. But wait one second. What if you can’t find one that meets all your personal needs that you need and you really don’t want to have a developer tweak an open source one? Then obviously the solution is to create your own right?

In my personal developer opinion, I would much rather create my own and use THAT; then tweak an already existing one. Here is why:

1. With tweaking or adding to an already existing project, you run that risk of your changes being screwed up if a patch is developed for something in the actual application.

2. You can have more control of your application if you develop it yourself.

3. It is easier to tweak your own code than tweak someone else’s.

So what to do?

If your plan is to develop a complete system for your clients, why not create your own CMS (Content Management System) and have it ready as an addition to the great work you do!

Tags: cms, content management systems

Five C’s for a Quicker Page Load

Posted on Sep 7, 2007 by Michelle to Technology Trends

On average, you have approx. 8 seconds for your page to load before a majority of viewers will opt to leave. This means that you can have the most graphically appealing, content rich site, but if you can’t meet acceptable load times, it won’t matter.

I am not saying you have to rid your site of images, however by properly optimizing your graphics, you can have the best of both worlds.

Crop & Resize: When posting a picture, crop the image so that you include only the focal point of the image. There is no need to include a picture of a crowd, when you only need to display a single person within that crowd. Additionally, you can resize images to suit the actual size that is necessary to view it.

Compress: This is one of easiest ways to reduce the size of an image. Once you have your image in an acceptable viewing size, you should reduce your images bandwidth load by reducing enough bytes to where it is unnoticeable to the human eye, but allows the image load much faster on the browser.

Control Parameters: You should control your images and sites parameters within the code of your pages. By doing so, you tell it exactly what to do, so that it doesn’t have to decide itself. In defining these, always use uniform attributes and don’t forget to surround the variables with quotations. In doing this the browser will know in advance how much space is required for a given image, and be able to move onto the next line of code instead of waiting for the entire image to load in order to find out.

CSS: To reduce the amount of code and information that must load on a page, you should build your site using CSS. In short, CSS hides all of the “tables” and leaves only the most pertinent information on the page. By hiding the bulk of the code, this allows the actual page to load faster.

Calibrate Coding: After optimizing your images and coding your site into CSS, you must then validate your site coding to remove any sloppy HTML and non-uniform attributes.

Tags: page load time