SEO: Page titles

[bwglaw]

Can any SEO experts out there advise the best way of using 'Page Titles' on our website I.e. handsonaccess.com // page title, or page title // handsonaccess.com etc

At the moment our http://www.handsonaccess.com site page titles refer to our key sections and then gives a description. Is this the best way?

Also on Link Popularity, Google shows 0 whereas MSN and Yahoo show 200+ and 400+ respectively.

We have reduced the number of keywords for the main sections and yet to do for the remaining pages rather than using the same keywords for the entire site.

Any advice appreciated to make our website more search engine friendly.

Thanks

[Tin]

Hi

Only had a quick glance at your site but I'd suggest;

* keep the characters limited to 70 max, no more as Google doesn't use them and it would just dilute the aim.
* make sure you include a keyword which you are actually targetting on that page itself so you ideally want different titles making use of different keywords on every page.
* remove the forward slashes and surplus words which are not fundamental in what your site is about or the audience you are targetting. Your current title reads more like a description than a title ie;
"Hands On Access Ltd // Making organisations accessible for deaf and disabled people // handsonaccess.com" could be changed to read
"Deaf disabled accessibility organisations".
Google places some weight on the title of a page (lots of other factors involved) towards that page's ranking so it makes sense to use this to your advantage. Cutting down the title to it's most relevant words helps you get the most benefit.
Although the page title isn't the only aspect involved in high rankings if you assume that your aim is to get the most benefit from the title then think along these lines;
Potential gain from title towards rankings is 100%.
This means that each word must have a bearing or 'weight' assigned to it. The more words, the less weight each word has.
A title of 10 words equates to a weight of just 10% per word
A title of 4 words = 25% each word
If you include in the title one or two keywords relevant for that page then you should see that those keywords now carry a better weight, this weight will help with better rankings. It's also easy to see that having 'non-useful' words in your titles can be wasteful.
I know it's a simple guide and that other elements need to be in place for the final picture but I hope you get some idea.
As a rule of thumb, when I build descriptions up for any given page I try to incorporate the keyword/s used in the title but in a different order such as;

Suggested Title:
Deaf disabled accessibility organisations

Suggested Description:
Accessibility consultants for deaf and disabled people - Handsonaccess.com

Hope that helps a bit.

Cheers

Ray

[Tin]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that as I'd suggested you removing your business name from the page title you'd obviously still want to rank well for your business name so just add an 'alt' tag to the little logo at the top of your page (on every page that is) mentioning your business name and that'll do the trick. Make sure that if you do add the alt tag to make the logo clickable to your home page.

Lastly, it's well known that Google 'holds back' from showing 'all' pages linking to any given site so the discrepancy you mention is to be expected. To get a reliable picture you could try www.alltheweb.com which tends to show steady results whereas MSN tends to change dramatically almost daily.

Ray

[mattk]

Don't forget that your pages have to be human readable, as well as search engine friendly!

I think the page title: Hands On Access Ltd // Making organisations accessible for deaf and disabled people // handsonaccess.com - is perfectly acceptable, as it's human readable AND it contains your keywords.

As for keywords, I'd construct a "core" set of keywords, about 10 - 20, which I'd put on every page and then another 10 - 20 keywords that are specific to the page they are on.

Tin is right about the links. Just make sure you are comparing like with like. Google is notoriously stingy with links, but at the same time, they apply more weight to the number of links when ranking a site. MSN and Yahoo are less link obsessed!

[Tin]

Hi

I'd suggested a shorter title as Google wasn't showing it fully anyway because of it's character limit ie;
"Making organisations accessible for deaf and disabled people ..."

A 'tighter' title would ensure it was fully displayed in Googles search snippets while at the same time adding a bit of extra weight to important keywords.

I notice that the title of the home page has just changed to
"Deaf and disability access consultancy // handsonaccess.com" which is much better, tighter, and conveys to the searcher a more focussed summary of what the site is about although I'd dump the 2 forward slashes and replace them with a single 'tilde' character and replace the handsonaccess.com with something geographic like "UK" assuming the site is only hitting the UK market. :-)

[bwglaw]

Thanks to Ray aka: Tin for his valuable advice. Having just changed the page title on our home page we now rank 2nd in MSN as disability consultants!

Now working on other suggestions once we get a new developer on board to implement the changes.

Thanks Ray, and MattK too

[Tin]

Thx Jonathan, good news.

Checking Yahoo.com you are #6 on page 1 and #5 on Yahoo.co.uk. This can be improved by changing your home page description to the one I mentioned a while ago and also reducing the number of keywords on your home page to just 6 in total. Remember to make sure you use the 2 words disability consultants as the first two words of the six, put a comma after them but no commas in between the other keywords something like

disability consultants, disabilities consultancy disabled advice

For Google you'll need to start doing other things such as building links using the words "disability consultants" as the link (anchor) text which you can do by using Google operators, type (including commas)
"addsite" + "disability consultants" into Google and you'll see that it forces Google to show pages that are related to your topic and also let you add a link to them. This is a very good technique (not always accurate as we're relying on an automated process to deliver relevant results but nevertheless very useful) to building related links. I think I've posted a fair bit on the topic of link building somewhere on the forum so you'll have to search on my posted messages to find it but very briefly,

you can change the search string components shown above to a variety of suitable things like
"addurl" + "disability"
"add_site" + "disabled access"
etc etc

There's also a lot of 'not to do's when building links which I cover as well in some posts.

Found one for you
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=8022

A warning! It's really time consuming to build links the most effective way as there's lots to consider but try to think about doing the following when link building

should I download the Google toolbar so I can ensure that a site/page I'm submitting too isn't banned or penalised YES
should I submit to sites that ask for a link in return NO
should I submit to sites that participate in link building schemes NO

other things are
the page you are submitting to should ONLY have links on it to other 'ON-TOPIC' resources within your market sector and not off shoots to pharm/gambling/finance/porn/ etc .

This will help you a lot if done carefully and slowly (about every 20 links vary your anchor text) to get high rankings in Google.

Cheers

Ray

[bwglaw]

Thanks for the tips Ray - working on it now.

We are now Number 1 on MSN search for 'disability consultants'!

http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=disability+consultants&srch_type=0&FORM=QBHP

We are number 6 on Yahoo for the same keywords:

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-pull-web-t-2&p=disability%20consultants&ei=ISO-8859-1

I am thinking to move the site to our other domain name: disabilityconsultants.co.uk or disabilityconsultancy and use handsonaccess.com as alias - may give a higher position with 'disability' in the domain name?