Backlinks are king to SEO ranking, but there is one very important aspect I see that is often overlooked.

Title Tags.

I have seen aged sites that have virtually no backlinks and little content still rank well just because they have the title tags set up correctly. In fact, I dealt with a client that was competing in selling POP displays. Their domain was about 8 years old, but for at least a year, they had little to no content, and had never engaged in a backlink campaign.

The competition was around 1.5 million competing pages and a lot of them were highly optimized for SEO. Interestingly, they were still ranking on page 3 for this keyword. You know why? It was the title tag and the fact that they had the “Google trust” of an aged domain.

So proper title tag set up will help with pushing your site through the rankings!

An Example:

Let’s say you wanted to rank for “fancy widgets”. You have to make sure that “Fancy Widgets” sits first in that tag.

Good:

<title>Fancy Widgets – Buy retail fancy plastic widgets at wholesale prices! – Smith and Sons Inc</title>

Bad:

<title>Smith and Sons – Retail Fancy Widgets at wholesale prices!</title>

Unless of course you’re looking to rank for “Smith and Sons” instead of “Fancy Widgets”.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run across companies that place their company name first in that tag, and rarely have the keyword in it.

After that, you want a call to action on fancy widgets, because this is not just for the search algorithms, this is for the people. This will give you two things. Driving the traffic to your site and allowing you to mix your keyword up a bit. In other words, go longtail. The only reason you’re doing this is to get click-throughs, so make sure you get an action verb in there.

After that it’s essential your copy reflect the keyword as well as what you’re offering.

You see, Google will crawl your site, see that title tag first, and then look for the keyword within your copy. Let’s say you have 500 words on this particular page. You’ll want “fancy widgets” in your copy at around 3.5% (I know there are differing opinions on this). You do more than that and you could be penalized for keyword stuffing. Just make it look natural to the user… make it readable!

If you did your keyword research properly, you’ll have also come up with a whole bunch of longtail keywords around fancy widgets. Get some of these in there too, because you’ll see your site rank for them along with your primary keyword.

So get to it! Go check your title tags and tweak them!

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