10 years ago, a very helpful employee from Excite.com revealed to me the essential SEO secrets that lurk behind the visible web page. While there have been huge changes in the entire SEO/SEM universe since that auspicious day, a lot of what rang true then still rings true now.

I’m not going to talk about algorithms or any sort of deep technical stuff.

There’s a ton of great information out there. What I am going to cover in this series, Top 10 SEO Copywriting Tips to Ranking Success, are the items that copywriters should and must know – whether it’s for their own website or writing content for another – about the stuff "under the hood" of today’s websites and blogs. With time and patience, these tips will help boost your site/blog ranking, increase traffic, and get your work noticed.

Today’s Tip – Don’t Forget Your Title Tags!

How many sites do you see today that still title their homepage with "HOME?" Too many and not just on small personal sites either. I’ve seen hundreds of slick commercial sites for well-known companies whose page titling is well, pretty pathetic — and worse, silently killing that site’s chances for a decent organic search engine ranking.

The remedy is simple: Give each page its own unique title and fill that title with the site’s most relevant keyword phrases.

That’s it. Pretty simple, huh? Of all the SEO techniques at your disposal this is perhaps the easiest yet most essential of them all. Some things you should know about crafting your title page:

First, here’s what the code looks like:  <title>Your Title Here</title>

• Compose your title for a human reader
• Think specific and meaningful, not clever – don’t spam or keyword stuff
• Write a unique title for EACH AND EVERY page in your website
• Make it no more than 8-10 words, 60 characters or less – otherwise you risk truncation. You want to see the entire title in the browser window
• Put your primary keyphrase/s first, your company name last. Here’s how I do it for AdoptShoppe, my online gift store. "Adoption Gifts" is my primary keyphrase.

<title>Unique Adoption Gifts and Books at AdoptShoppe</title>

• Try writing it as a sentence (client wanted their name first)

<title>Reading Rockets : Reading Comprehension & Language Arts Teaching Strategies for Kids</title>

• Or use short keyphrases separated by a – or |

<title>Concrete Form Liners / Custom Terrazzo Designs / Creative Form Liners, Inc.</title>

Your title tag has to answer "Is this what I’m looking for?"

Your visitors, as well as Google and other search engines use the title tag to determine page and content relevance. Relevance – a term and concept I’ll spend a lot of time on in future posts in this series – is the key driver to top ranking, increased traffic, and conversion, another critical concept we’ll cover in the weeks ahead.

Good Resources for SEO Copywriting below (these are my affiliate links):

• Web Copywriting Mastery Course
• The Step-By-Step™ Copywriting Course
• The SEO Book

Next up, "How do I determine the relevant keyphrases?" That’s the focus of Tip #2 in an upcoming post. Watch for it!

Maven’s Maxim
All web pages get their own unique, tightly crafted and relevant titles. Don’t stuff, spam or write cute. Write with precision and meaning to your human reader.

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