SEO By Me » On Page http://seobyme.com Ultimate, Practical & Comprehensive Search Engine Optimization Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:00:21 +0000 en hourly 1 First Thing First: The Title Tag On Your Website http://seobyme.com/45/first-thing-first-the-title-tag-on-your-website/ http://seobyme.com/45/first-thing-first-the-title-tag-on-your-website/#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:00:21 +0000 Denis Kristanda http://seobyme.com/?p=45 Whatever kind of website you have – blog, e-commerce, review site, mini site, landing page, profile page, etc -  one of the important things you need to look after is the TITLE TAG for each of the web page as this become the “label” or your site. -ksr_trseobm-

The Gist of TITLE TAG

The purpose of this TITLE TAG has 2 folds:

  1. To summarize the content of the page while attracting user to click the link.
  2. To be the main item to be indexed by search engine.

To set your webpage title, you just need to put it between <title> and </title> on top of your page. Typically, the title tag should be your 4th line of the code, after DOCTYPE, HTML and HEAD. For example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<title>3 Keys SEO Principle: Absolute Must To Know | SEO By Me</title>

There are 3 prominent places where this title will be displayed as key label, in order of importance:

  1. On the SERP (Search Engine Result Page): This is the most important aspect of SEO effort. You will want the search engine to index your page according to what you want.
    [SERP]

    Search Engine Result Page

  2. On Bookmarks (Online and Offline): I am not talking only about the bookmark for each browser (try press Ctrl-D to bookmark this page), but also the social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Mixx, Twitter, etc. When a user want to share or save on any of those site, by default, whatever you put between those title tag will be used as your main display/entry.
  3. On the top of your browser windows and tab: This display is the least of our worry as it is being displayed on user’s browser after it is loaded. Well, the user already click and display the full page on his/her browser, so, the very purpose of this title tag has been accomplished.
    [Title on Internet Browser]

    Title on Internet Browser

What’s Next

So, having known the above, some importants aspect below need to be considered seriously to achieve the maximum of your SEO effort:

  1. The title tag need to be different for each web page as it has to represent the content.
    So, if you have static website (html), you need to edit each of the page and customized the title tag accordingly. If you have dynamic page, make sure the title page is generated dynamically as well – do not just put your website or blog name between the title tag.

    WordPress Tip: Do not muck around with the title tag, simply just put below line on your header.php or whereever your theme produce the header:

    <title><?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?></title>

    and then install All-In-One SEO pack to take care the rest. Even the default setting of this plugin will give you the most of title tag’s SEO.
    .

  2. Incorporate keyword(s) in the title.
    Forget all the fancy title, it is important to incorporate whatever you want to emphasize and ranked high on the search engine. For example: if you have article about the latest gossip of Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie, do not just write the title tag as “Stop Press! They Did It Again !” which is does not mean much. But try like “Brad Pitt Makes Angeline Jolie Mad: Yesterday News?” which incorporate 3 important phrase “Brad Pitt”, Angelina Jolie” and “News” – Yes, you can write anything at all on the actual title on the article, but pay a little bit more attention for the Title Tag.
    .
  3. It’s Premium Space: Make it Short and Prioritize.
    Remember, Google (and others too) will only display the first 65 characters on the SERP. So, incorporate some keywords, but do not stuff it with too much keywords that make the title very lengthy. 65 characters should be enough. Just prioritize.
    Anything above 65 characters will be truncated and an ellipsis (“…“) is being displayed instead on Google’s.
    .
  4. Incorporate your brand,  if possible.
    On the example above, I put “| SEObyme” at the end of the title tag. This is call branding. Imagine if you see the SERP above, just a glance you will know which article is from your website. But remember that keywords has more priority than branding. So put your brand at the end of the title, so if you need to have extra keyword and the titles goes beyond 65 characters
    .
  5. Support the title tag with headline
    Your title tag does not have to be exactly the same with your headline (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>…), but maintain at least partial aspect of the title tag into the headlines. Not only for the search engine to confirm the content consistency/relevancy, but also to manage your reader expectation when they click your title tag.
    .
  6. Use normal capitalization.
    Do not use all capitals letter on the title tag. This will alert the search engine robot that your site might be a SPAM site as that what Spam website usually do (using all capital letters, or all lower case letter). Not only that, it will become an eyesore for your user as more and more people is now aware that capital letter is a SCREAMING method. If people scream at you, will you visit them ? Not likely…
    .

OK, now… check and fix all of your title tag !

]]> http://seobyme.com/45/first-thing-first-the-title-tag-on-your-website/feed/ 0 Optimizing The Speed Of Your Website: The Method http://seobyme.com/27/optimizing-the-speed-of-your-website-the-method/ http://seobyme.com/27/optimizing-the-speed-of-your-website-the-method/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:44:54 +0000 Denis Kristanda http://seobyme.com/?p=27 Having a fast website is one of the top wish list from a webmaster or website owner. Usually I don’t really pay attention about this as it’s talking about money. The more money as your capital for your website, usually the more faster your website will be as you can afford to buy a better server or hosting plan. But I have to rethinking everything because of this additional reason. -ksr_trseobm-

Google indicates that the speed of your site will be considered as part of the page rank formulation. Website with speedy display will have additional point used for calculate it’s rank.

As usual, there is no exact formula, there is no definite date as when it’s going to be implemented and people is wondering around. But Google gives more definitive clue. As Yahoo has its YSlow extension, Google is now also incorporating similar tools on its webmaster tools complete with massive documentation as an instruction to everybody how to do it right. Explain below is the method to benchmark the performance of your website using mainly Google’s Page Speed tools and Pingdom performance tools. It’s quite simple and will not cost you money to do it. Let’s get started.

Resources[Site Performance in Webmaster Tools]

There are 4 main resources that need to be handy on your computer to start optimizing the speed of your website.

  1. Account on Google’s Webmaster Tools (Free to signup if you haven’t has one: every serious webmaster need to have one!)
  2. Google’s Page Speed extension on Firefox.
    Use your Firefox, login to you Google’s Webmaster Tools, click on your site, and on the left hand Dashboard menu, click the “Site Performance” as picture. Then click the below button.
    [Install Page Speed]
    Page Speed requires “Firebug” to work. If you haven’t installed this just get it here.
  3. Online Pingdom Tools , http://tools.pingdom.com/ – Alternatively, you can use “WebPageTest.Org” on http://www.webpagetest.org/. It’s more comprehensive but could be overwhelming and confusing if you are not up to it. Pingdom is good enough – you just want to compare the result before and after optimization unless you want to go deep in this stuffs.
  4. Page Speed documentation as your knowledge base in doing the optimization

Method Optimizing Your Website

  1. [websiteinfo start] Go to Pingdom Tools : http://tools.pingdom.com/, enter the URL of the homepage of your website and run the test.
  2. After test finish, note the total time required to load your website in the “Website Information” on the left bottom corner of the screen
    In this example, it took 9.7 seconds to load 41 object of 585.2KB
  3. Now open Firebug (the default: press F12 key), click Page Speed and make sure “Profile Deferrable JavaScript” is active
    [Page Speed Option] (click the arrow and tick the option)
  4. Clear the cache of your browser and restart the browser
  5. Go to your website but do not login into your website as it may behave differently (sent additional info in cookies, etc). If you are logged in, just logout.
  6. Activate / open the firebug again (press f12) and click Page Speed
  7. Refresh the display of your website by clicking Refresh button while holding the shift key (to not using cache)
  8. Click “Analyze Performance” button on firebug
    [Analyze]
  9. [Page Speed Result]The result then will be displayed on screen, something like pictured on the right. In general there will be 3 different marking the green tick, the yellow triangle and red exclamation. Well, start fixing the problem from the reds then yellows. And basically don’t worry about items that already green.
  10. Try to work the item one by one with patience. Don’t expect to be able to fix everything within few minutes. Take a good half day or full day to do this optimization. If you are not the technical person, have your technical person be with you when you do this. Otherwise with a bit effort you will find that doing this optimization is a little bit fun.
  11. Repeat task (1) to compare the result

This method and tools are the one wake me up that you can really do something to speed up the website. On this actual sample website. I manage to make change the access from 9.7s to only 1.8s or roughly 5x faster.

pingdom result

Waterfall Chart to visualize the loading of all your file

Because of the good result, I actually now can add some functionality on the website to make it even better. If you’re curious, the real website that I did above was http://cookingbyme.com – a start-up cooking niche wordpress blog. After adding the FCG as you can see, the access is still pretty fast (under 4s). No the website is on managed VPS, not dedicated server.

Doing further comparison, it seems that although located on the same server, different website with difference theme and functionality, give me a really different result.

I would suggest to make all your website accessible and displayed around 5 second. The faster the better. Not only it will give you bonus point for the pagerank, but also make your visitor happy and in awe – stand up from the crowd: not only the content and functionality, but the speed as well.

What I really did will be written on several other article on this website as well. Stay tune !

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