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The title tag is an HTML title element critical to both SEO and user experience that is used to briefly and accurately describes the topic and theme of an online document.
The title tag is displayed in two key places:
- Internet Browser – Title Tags display in the top bar of internet browsers.
- Search Result Pages – Search engines display title tags in their results along with another less important on-page factor, the meta description tag.
Importance for SEO:
Historically, the title tag has consistently been one of the single most important on-page SEO factors. Before search engine algorithms increased their complexity, the title tag was an easy way to try and determine the topic and relevancy of a page. As search engines evolved, their algorithms started to include additional factors such as link data, social media interaction and traffic/performance metrics. The title tag, however, still holds great value for on-page search engine optimization.
According to SEOmoz’s annual Search Ranking Factors survey of 37 influential thought leaders in the SEO industry, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword usage in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.
Creating Optimized Title Tags
Title tags are one of the best return on investment SEO techniques because they are a low effort and high return task. Most blogging platforms like WordPress and Drupal either provide built in solutions or downloadable add-ons to provide access to create and edit title tags.
Optimization Tips:
- Be Accurate – Try not to wonder off topic with your title tags as they are used as a relevancy factor to describe a page in search engine algorithms. Stray too far off the path and you may look like you’re spamming, keyword stuffing or other manipulative techniques.
- Don’t Target Too Many Terms on One Page – A good rule of thumb is to try not to target more than a couple keywords per page. If you could create a standalone article on the topic, it should be its own page. This method allows search engines to more easily determine the topic and relevancy of your page.
- Optimize Your Length for Results Pages – Search engines standardize their results pages by limiting the amount of characters they show per element of a listing. Title tags are allowed a maximum of 70 characters is the maximum amount of characters before they display an ellipsis – “…” to signify that a title tag has been cut off. Your title tag may not make sense to a user if it gets cut off before the point is made, so be sure to check title tag length. Additionally, don’t go overboard with keywords and use common sense to know what looks too long.
- Keyword Placement and Order Matters – According to SEOmoz’s survey, the earlier the keyword is used in the placement of the title tag, the more helpful it is for ranking factors. Additionally, because it is near the beginning and likely not cut off at the 70 character limit, the more likely a user will see it and click on your search result listing.
- Try to Be Enticing – Your title tag is a searcher’s first impression with your page and sometimes brand. Leverage the title tag to not only optimize for SEO but also for user experience. Studies have shown that the message you convey in your title tag can get your more traffic than the search result listing ranked above you. Think of the following example – which one would you click on?:
Option A: Digital Cameras – Company Name
Option B: Buy Digital Cameras and Accessories – Limited 20% off – Company Name
Search Engine Result Pages
One last thing to note is that any keywords in title tags, meta descriptions and display URLs that match the performed search query will be bolded on the search results page. With searchers using title tags to determine which listing they click on, an optimized and enticing title tag can increase click-through rates and greater brand awareness.
Engaging with today’s new breed of socially-enabled buyer, or Customer 2.0, has become increasingly difficult for B2B sales and marketing organizations. Traditional marketing tactics have become increasingly ineffective. Inbound marketing, which is focused on generating relevant content that results in “getting found” by customers vs. the other way around, has brought new life for marketing. Similarly, B2B sales organizations are adopting inbound selling (a.k.a. social selling) to drive prospect engagement in the latter stages of the buying process.
Getting found requires not only relevant content but also good visibility on search engines (which is where most customers begin their research.) Making your content visible to Google and other search engines requires SEO (search engine optimization.) SEO is often confused with online marketing and inbound selling, but is in fact a very distinct discipline. As we’ve explained in a previous post, the equation for getting found looks something like this:
SEO + Inbound Marketing = Getting Found (by search engines AND customers)
So without further ado, he are 20 key SEO terms that inbound marketing professionals must understand:
301 Redirect – A redirect is a technique for forwarding one URL to another URL. It’s a useful and dangerous tool to seamlessly forward visitors and search engine spiders to a new URL for one of several reasons including if a website needed to change its domain or a time sensitive page like a contest has expired and is no longer relevant. 301 redirects, unlike 302 redirects, also transfer PageRank and SEO value to the new URL.
Breadcrumb – A breadcrumb is a navigational trail used on web pages to display where the page sits in the hierarchy of the website. Each level of the breadcrumb is usually a link back to the referenced page. An example breadcrumb looks like this: “Home > Category > Product Page”
Canonical – Similar to the 301 redirect, URL canonicalization is an HTML tag to help eliminate duplicate copies of the same page on a website. Unlike redirects, canonical URL tags are only used for search engine spiders to signal that the duplicate pages have a single source.
Co-citation – Co-citations are links used to establish similarity between two web pages. If sites A and B are either linked to or cited by site C, then they may be related to each other even though they may not directly link to each other. For an example, say your blog about banking is linked to from 1,000 other websites that also link to WellsFargo.com. Search engines will use the existence of 1,000 co-citations to establish relevance between your blog and Wells Fargo.
CSS – CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is part of HTML code that outline the layout of different elements of your site such as your header, content area, widgets, etc.
Image Alt Text – Alt tags are used in the HTML code to describe images on a web page. Since search engines cannot see images, the use alt text along with other factors to determine what the image is and how relevant it is. An example of alt text: <img src="image24094.gif" alt=”Latest picture of BP oil spill“>
Inbound Link – An inbound link is a link from an external site to your site. An example would be if Site A adds a link to Site B on its homepage. Site B would have an inbound link from Site A. To see how many inbound links your site or page has, use the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool.
Indexed Pages – Indexed pages refers to the number of pages of your site that search engines have found, crawled and stored in their index. A page cannot rank for a search term unless it is in the search engine index.
Internal Links – Unlike inbound links, internal links is a link from one page on your site to another page on your site. An example would be if Site A added a link to the About Us page from the homepage of Site A. Internal links are valuable for SEO, although not considered to carry the same weight as an inbound link from an external source.
Long Tail – Long tail refers to uncommon search queries, generally phrases that are 3+ keywords in length. Popularized by Chris Anderson, long tail refers to the statistical probability distribution that there is a larger share of traffic to be gained by targeting the large number of uncommonly searched queries as opposed to the few, but wildly competitive and highly trafficked head terms.
NoFollow – A link element used in the HTML code of a link to tell search engines to not pass any SEO value or PageRank through the link. It was created to prevent spam in blog comments that the blog author could not control. An example of the nofollow code: <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount drugs</a>
NoIndex – Noindex is a HTML tag that tells search engine spiders to prevent storing the page in a search engine index. It can be used for private information that you would not want anyone to find through a search engine. Found in the <head> section of the web page, an example code looks like: <meta content=”noindex” />
Outbound Link – An outbound link is a link from your site to an external site. An example would be if Site A adds a link to Site B on its homepage. Site A would have an outbound link to Site B.
PageRank – Is a link analysis algorithm, assigning a numerical weighting for the total value and trust accumulated by your entire site (all pages) based on the quantity and quality of the links pointed at your site. Links are used by the search engines as the main factor determining trust, relevancy and the importance of a page and domain based on the quantity and quality of the links that point to it. Every link on the web is treated as a “vote” and that the more votes a page has, the more value its vote’s pass.
Robots.txt – Robots.txt is a protocol that determines the accessibility of specific pages on a domain to search engine spiders. The robots.txt file tells search engine spiders which pages to disallow any crawling or indexing before the spider even reaches the page. Try typing in any domain followed by /robotx.txt and see one for yourself: http://www.google.com/robots.txt
Spider – A search engine spider is an automated program, known as a robot or crawler, that navigates through the web, crawling and indexing content from sites into a search engine index.
Subdomain – A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. An example would be Money.CNN.com is a subdomain of www.CNN.com. Subdomains are treated as separate sites from the larger domain it’s a part of and do not carry over the SEO value from its parent domain.
Subfolder – A subfolder is a folder or path contained within a domain. An example would be www.google.com/adsense is a subfolder to www.google.com. Subfolders are treated as the same site as the parent domain and carry over all SEO value.
Title Tag – Title tags are HTML tags in the code of a web page that define the title of the page. Title tags are displayed in the menu bar of internet browsers and on search engine results pages with a short meta description snippet. They are one of the most important on-page factors for SEO.
WHOIS – WHOIS is a query protocol to determine who the owner of a website is. Many resources are available to search WHOIS records such as Network Solutions. Private registrations can be used to hide contact information for WHOIS records.
With healthcare reforms under way in the US, saying that the healthcare industry is undergoing a sea of change is an understatement! Bottom line – many companies across the healthcare value chain are impacted – be it insurers, technology providers, or benefits firms. For healthcare providers, like others, focusing on finding new growth opportunities and improving profitability through higher productivity are both critical.
Recently, we’ve been seeing tremendous interest in InsideView from companies across the healthcare sector, as they look to boost sales productivity and pursue new market opportunities created by healthcare reform – these include firms in the Fortune 100 as well as emerging technology leaders.
We’d like to thank these healthcare firms for choosing InsideView, and are excited about doing our part for the healthcare industry.
Leads are coveted. Leads are adored. We score leads and we nurture leads. Leads are measured in meticulous detail, and continue to keep many, myself included, up at odd hours of the evening. Leads are made famous in movies and television alike. My favorite all time sales guy, Dwight Schrute, spent one entire Office episode asking one question: ‘When are the leads getting here man?’
At best, the lead qualification process energizes and enables fruitful sales engagements which delivers prized funnel into the forecast. At worst, lead qualification is a cycle dialing, canned email popping machine who slowly beats prospects into submission. If you are seeking ways to improve your ability to accelerate lead qualification, and aren’t interested in beating your prospects into submission, here are a few things to consider:
- Knowledge is Power – It is critical to provide timely and relevant sales intelligence at the fingertips of your lead qualification team, and in many cases this falls right within your CRM. When I say sales intelligence, I don’t mean employee counts, revenue, URL, and geographic location which is typically what lead qualification teams leverage. I am talking about surfacing social profiles and social connections, presenting the climate of the prospects business and uncovering what is being said and about that prospect in the online world. Customers, particularly Customer 2.0, will appreciate this knowledge on the front line and will become more open to meetings and demonstrations and allow you to accelerate more leads into the funnel.
- Speed, I am Speed – Speed is also extremely critical in terms of engaging with leads. Study after study shows the material degradation of leads as the seconds fly away. Without providing a tightly integrated sales intelligence solution to your sales team, those resources will waste critical minutes attempting to uncover some form of intelligence. Lead qualification team members will run to LinkedIn, Google, legacy data providers like Hoovers and Onesource to hopefully extract something meaningful. That wastes valuable time and will not provide a complete and relevant profile of your prospects.
- Call Around the Lead – The ability to profile contacts and executives wider and deeper in an organization is paramount to improving lead qualification since let’s be honest, your decision makers are not out filling lead forms all day. The fact that someone came to your website or attended a campaign event demonstrates that at least someone believes there is a need for your solution. Through a comprehensive sales intelligence solution, such as SalesView, your sales team will be able to uncover additional contacts and easily find a credible message to have a better conversation.
As the buying process continually evolves and the competitive landscape becomes more and more crowded, differentiating yourself on the very first engagement has become more critical than ever. Using real time and accurate sales intelligence to improve your conversations and quickly engage with multiple contacts in a credible fashion will drive many more leads into opportunities and ultimately allow your Inside Sales managers get a better nights sleep.
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. — Arthur C. Clarke
About 32,000 years ago, French cavemen started drawing on their walls to help each other solve the crucial problem of the day: Where can I find big meaty animals, and how do I kill them?
Since then, our communication tools have advanced beyond bone chisels and ochre paint, but the central objective hasn’t changed so much. We’re all still looking for that woolly mammoth.
For most salespeople, the search involves gathering data, from which to glean insights, enabling a conversation to begin, in the pursuit of a sale.
It’s a multi-step journey. Unfortunately, too many data providers act as if the first part – amassing raw information about a prospect – is all you need to close a deal.
At a basic level, any piece of data is just a fact. This company had $50 million in revenue last year, for example, or that CEO’s name is Pat Paterson. No matter its size, any database is simply a compilation of facts, and nothing more.
A dictionary is not a great novel just because it contains all the words of a great novel.
Smart. Fresh. Complete.
Awhile back, we condensed InsideView’s product goals to a catchphrase: Smart. Fresh. Complete.
Roughly translated, it means we’re aiming to provide the information you need (Complete), in real-time (Fresh), cleverly parsed into unique, relevant analysis (Smart).
Smart comes first in that mantra, and it’s not a coincidence. To us, it’s the key differentiator between InsideView sales intelligence and Old-School Data. Facts are common; intelligence is rare.
A fact is the news that Company X plans to acquire Company Y. Intelligence is the proper interpretation of how that event will affect operations at the two firms, as well as how the merger will shift the landscape of its industry.
Deeper intelligence is to demonstrate the ways you can benefit from it all, by detailing how the acquirer’s goals dovetail with your own product’s features, and pointing out that the CEO sits on a charity board with your own boss.
Old-School Data companies want you to believe that “data” and “intelligence” are synonyms. That’s why their marketing pitches always emphasize quantity over quality, as well as the horsepower of their data-gathering engines.
More data does not mean better data. Even if it did, it would not make those vast accumulations of facts more useful in-and-of themselves. Analysis is what turns information into knowledge, and intelligence is what turns that knowledge into wisdom.
Smart companies know that.
Yesterday marked the one year birthday of the SalesView Buzz tab. The Buzz tab launched on May 11th, 2009 as the first Twitter integration for CRM (including Salesforce, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite CRM.) While the launch was received with a great deal of enthusiasm by media and analysts (after all, what journalist wasn’t smitten with Twitter in the Spring of 2009?), the benefits of having Tweets about customers and prospects available directly within CRM were not immediately obvious to many B2B sales people.
Similar to the adoption pattern for our Facebook mash-up and LinkedIn integration before, customers and prospects started to identify and leverage actionable sales intelligence from the social media stream. One of my favorite anecdotes comes from a meeting with the VP of Sales at a key customer account a few months after we launched the Buzz tab. As part of our regular quarterly account review we walk customers through recent features & enhancements. This included the Buzz tab at the time so we had him bring up the SalesView Buzz tab (i.e. Twitter & Google blog search) for his own company.
As it turned out, one of the most recent Tweets mentioning his company was a person looking for competitive product recommendations:
- “We’re evaluating marketing automation solutions – (our customer) vs. (competitor #1) vs. (competitor #2). Thoughts?”
TA-WEET! Yes, that was a hot lead and yes he was impressed. The icing on the cake was that within a few minutes the VP of Sales had logged in to see the Buzz tab for himself and by that time someone had already responded as follows:
- “Definitely (competitor #1)… we went through the selection process over 1 year ago and have been happy since.”
TWUH-OH! He interrupted our meeting to make sure the right sales rep followed up on this lead immediately, before his competitor (or their fans) could further slant the conversation to their favor.
Now obviously you will not always have hot leads like these land in your lap but this example does speak to how important a customer acquisition channel Twitter has become. As with other traditional and emerging channels, it provides new ways in which to listen and engage with the new, social customer (a.k.a. Customer 2.0) . The nature of Twitter, which is real-time and entirely public, requires that you sales reps keep an ear to the ground at all times, lest your competitors should be the ones to pounce first.
Last week, amidst continuing news of the Madoff scandal, the thought crossed our minds: This seemingly distant national headline sensation is directly related to what sales folks unfortunately experience regularly: Lost deals and customers. Simply put, they are the result of poor intelligence. And on the bright side, while we can’t turn back the clock on Madoff, every day we have new opportunities to compete for customers.
This is the theme of a recent post featured in Sales and Marketing Management, penned by our CEO, Umberto. Want to read more? Check it out here.
