There are millions of people that know what SEO is. There are still millions that don’t and you may very well be one of them. If you are, then you should read on to take your first steps with this simple but very effective online marketing technique.

First, we need to get a bit of background on what SEO is. For this we can take a ride over to the ever expanding mess that is wikipedia where we can nab this bit of information:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (also known as “organic” or “algorithmic”) search engine listings. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic. This is analogous to foot traffic in retail advertising. The term SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a search engine results page (SERP), including paid advertising in the form of pay per click advertisements and paid inclusion listings, as well as unpaid organic search results and keywords specific listings, such as news stories, definitions, map locations, and images. SEO is concerned with improving the number and position of a site’s listings in the organic search results.

SEO strategies vary widely, in accordance with the specific site. Broadly speaking, SEO may be geared towards increasing either, or both, the total number and quality of visitors from Search Engines. The quality of a visitor can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information.

Right, now that we have covered that perhaps we should move onto the details surrounding how to get started in sucking more traffic to your website, yes?

There are many different view points within the SEO community as to what are the most effective SEO means for getting traffic to a website so do keep in mind that this is based on personal experience over the last 7 or so years right up to today and as such is “proven to work” in my own projects and clients that I have done work for.

I am not going to give you everything in one go so don’t panic, instead today we are going to focus on page titles, the text that appears in the top browser bar like right now on this very page. e.g:

As you can see, there are a number of words there that would be used by someone using, say, Google to search for “Search Engine Optimisation”.

Search engines have things called “bots” that wander around the internet looking at websites and taking information back home to be processed. The key with page titles is that they are one of the first things these “bots” will see from your page. In addition, they know that it should be quite a good indicator of what the page contains the same way that you can often tell what a book is about by the title on the cover.

Because of this emphasis on the page titles it is worth making sure that yours are up to scratch on the pages of your site. If you use a system like wordpress (which is an online blogging platform) then your page titles should be automagically generated by the software based on what you enter as your title. This does mean that you need to keep in mind that whatever you type is what the search engines are going to see.

The best way to really get a grip on how to use titles is to perform searches in Google, Yahoo, MSN /Live etc and see how the keywords you searched for show up in the results page titles and content, this simple action can really be an eye opener in how to use page titles on your own webpages.

If you have any other questions about page titles please post them below in the comments and I will look to address them directly for you as that is why we are here!