Small Business Seo - How To Dominate Your Local Market With The Use Of Title Tags

When it comes to ecommerce or an affiliate website, these types of sites can have thousands, if not millions of competing pages. Luckily, business websites, particularly those of small local businesses, don't have nearly the competition. They have online markets that aren't very competitive, usually have less than 100,000 competitors. That's not as big a number as you think, because actual competing pages are usually less than 10. So how do you outrank your competitors in your local market and come out on top? Read on:

Optimize the titles of the pages you are trying to rank higher up in the search engines!

Your web page's title is most definitely one of the most important factors when it comes to on-page seo. That's why "optimizing" it can give a practically instantaneous lift in your rankings. This may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people don't do this correctly, (including your competition)! Just do a search on Google and you'll be shocked how many do this. Often they won't consider how critical this is, and will instead leave their titles as "page title," or "untitled" or even "here is where the title goes." Even the name of the company isn't necessarily always enough, and many of your competition only do that.

But this is good news for you! Once you are aware of how critical title tags are, you can get a serious leg up on your competitors in your local market. One of the best ways to optimize your titles is to put in the title of your home page (assuming you are trying to rank your home page) 2 or 3 of your main keywords. Separate the different keywords with dashes. But you do need to be careful, because if you go overboard the search engines will penalize you. Don't "stuff" your title with the same keywords. Here's an example on how to do it right. Say you have a heating repair business in Bogota, New Jersey. At the beginning of your title, put "Bogota heating repair," then add a dash and add "furnace repair Bogota New Jersey." As you can see, in the second part you reverse the order of the words and add your state to the end. You're looking for a couple of variations of titles that include the keywords that your target audience would search for when looking for your business online. Make sure to get that main keyword in, as well a couple that are related. It's also important to understand that Google (and most other search engines) will only display 65 characters, and cut off anything else on the search engine results pages. So going overboard is rather pointless!

Remember, coming up with a good title isn't that difficult. Just open up Microsoft Word (or your preferred word processor) and play around with a title for a couple of minutes. And don't agonize too hard over this process, because even if you just get your main keyword in the page title, you are still way ahead of more than 95% of your competitors. After all, most of them haven't bothered to even look at their page titles!