On Search Engine Optimization - Title Tags

I have recently been working on updating our Kymanox websites to be more optimized for search engines. I must get a dozen spam messages per week from people claiming to be Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts. It does seem to be a very confusing topic, and I wanted to elaborate on what I've found to be useful, for the benefit of others reading this blog who might be interested in SEO.




This will be a series of posts about the best practices I have found in optimizing our pages for search engines.

Title, Title, Title
The title tag in an HTML document seems to be one of the most important, if not THE most important part of Search Engine Optimization. Here is an example:

Kymanox has a website called the KymaSTORE, which sells what we call, "Downloads for Ideal Knowledge Transfer". We sell all kinds of useful items for the Biotech, Pharmaceutical, and Medical Device industries, including Template Packages, Classroom Training Courses, Training Packages, Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Packages, Equipment and Services for Equipment like the Kaye Validator 2000, GMP Pens - our cGMP Compliant Indelible Ink Pens, and our KymaPRO Project Collaboration Website Software. I have spent a number of weeks optimizing the pages on our store to help search engines find our wide range of useful products.

I have noticed that the Title of the product makes a huge difference in whether the page ranks at the top of the search engine page, or many pages back, or not at all. Here is a great example:

Our product, Introduction to cGMP Current Good Manufacturing Practices Training Package, is indexed quite nicely when you search for "Current Good Manufacturing Practices Training Package" on Google. However, once you shorten your search to "GMP Training Package" as is often done with the phrase, "Good Manufacturing Practices", you will lose our package from the list.

So as you can see, Title is king in SEO. In the next post I will discuss ways in which I am trying to target multiple phrases and alleviate the problem noted above.