Sebastian

I thought I'd blog about three SEO techniques I've been using successfully for Title Tags. I hope this will be useful to some folks.

I'll use the example of an affiliate writing a post on Omaha poker strategy, and choosing this generic title tag: "omaha poker".

Tips:

1) Go slightly wider with your title tags:

Improvement 1 (obvious) would be "Omaha Poker Strategy"

This is where I like to go wide by using a staged title tag.

Improvement 2: Omaha Poker Strategy - How To Play Omaha Poker

I like the "how to play" here a lot, because it helps you rank for "Play Omaha Poker" and emphasizes "Omaha Poker" with redundancy.

Some people will think the second part is too wide because it implies rules. If so, you could use

Improvement 3: Omaha Poker Strategy - Beat Omaha Poker

Note: This technique is best suited to solid, established sites. If you have a new site, I wouldn't recommend going overboard . There is a fine line between this and keyword stuffing. If your site isn't ranking well yet, rely primarily on the internal post longtails. As soon as the page starts growing in the SERPS, try going wider with your title. And make sure the extra keywords in the title tags are always mirrored by the content.

2) Homepage Title Tag Keyword Prominence

From my own experience, I notice the homepage title tag keyword ordering directly affects the internal posts in how they rank.

For example, let's say our affiliate has an omaha centric site but has been greedy on his homepage and his title tag is

<title> Poker Site Bonuses - Poker Strategy - Omaha Strategy </title>

The most prominent keywords are "poker site bonuses". They are the start of the Title Tag. Matt Cutts slipped that keywords at the start of Title Tags are emphasized by the algorithm (Michael Martinez also wrote about this on his blog).

In this case I think his internal page on "omaha poker strategy" would rank higher if the homepage title tag was re-ordered as so:

<title> Omaha Strategy - Poker Strategy - Poker Site Bonuses </title>

Google gets it that Omaha Poker is the main added value of the site and the internal page will get bonus points because of it. Again, this is my personal observation.

I'm not saying that the second title tag is better by the way, just discussing title tag relationship. Balancing them correctly can be tricky.

3) Use Singular/Plural Form for your Title keywords + Synonyms

Some folks look for the "best poker site" and others for the "us poker sites". For your homepage in particular, I would suggest to mix up singular/plural form. Also, it's a good idea to include synonyms.

By the way, here's how to find Google Synonyms. Go to the search bar and type this character: ~ followed by your keywords.

If you type ~ poker then all the bolded terms will be synonyms according to Google. For example holdem, and hold'em will show up in bold.

Anyways, the main tips would be the following:

• Place the most important keywords at the beginning.
• Think about homepage title for the internal pages.
• Go slightly wider with title tags for the internal pages.
• Write titles using capitals, like the title of a book.
• Keep titles down to 64 characters long.
• Use Slight Variations of keywords with Singular/Plural Form

I also suspect, but I'm not sure, that going wider with your title tags gives you points for uniqueness. There are millions of documents with the title tag "omaha poker".

Would love to hear alternative strategies or criticism if you have it.

Thanks

Sebastian

PS: If you want to discuss SEO or do business with me, add me to msn: zen-182 at hotmail.com. Thanks.