Way back when, when stagecoaches ruled the highways, and the internet was not owned by Google, Yahoo ran the world of search engines. Alta Vista gave it a good whirl as a competitor, but then the mighty Google came by smacking all of them to an extremely downgraded second place at best. Where was Microsoft in all of this?
July 22nd: I recently created a poll about this, and would love your vote on what search engine you think is better: Which Gives Better Search Results, Google or Bing?
So you have just hired me to do my basic Usability and Design Analysis. I open up my browser, and then visit your site. What is the first thing that I look at? It’s the title of your site. The title of your site, though often out of site and out of mind, is an extremely valuable part of a website. It’s so important, I have made it a point to check this item first.
Valuable Assets of a Website TitleOne of my favorite things to do when I see “Title Abuse” is to imagine it on a book cover. Would you really put that crazy, long, keyword like list, as the title of your website? Many do. Before you make the mistake yourself though, you should spend a little time thinking about the value of a site or page title. A short quality title does many things.
If you use my sample book in the image on the right, “A site feedback usability design seo web hosting search blog review layout flash for Dummies” you can see the title does not mean much. It’s obviously a keyword plug, and if it were put on a book it would look like crap. Well guess what? That’s what it’s worth on a website as well.
Think about some famous book titles for example: “The Stand”, “Catch 22″, or a less fictional books like “HTML for Dummies”. Notice something in common? They are all short. In fact, if you were to search for long book titles on the net you will find that the longest ones are not much longer than seventy characters total. Think there is truth to the fact that SEO experts say to keep your title to a maximum of sixty-five characters? I do. Anything after sixty-five, and it all starts turning to meaningless mush. Write a book or something. A good title will inspire, create curiosity, and define content within, and it will do it quickly. It will also appear more real to a search engine.
Titling your home page “Home Page” is descriptive, but it’s worthless in a stack of other bookmarked pages. When creating your title, make sure you think about what it will look like when someone bookmarks the page. This reasoning is also valuable when looking for your site by means of toolbar or tabs in your browser. Imagine having ten tabs open in your browser, and they all said “Home Page”. Title says where? It better, or at least give a very good clue.
Well duh. I think you know what a title is for, right? Maybe not. I have done hundreds of analyses, and have seen countless pages tittled in horrible ways, and capitalization? Did anyone graduate high school? Titles are to be capitalized for starters. It is how we identify content. It is similar in context as your name, and in fact is the NAME of the website or website page.
Knowing this leads to a less obvious, but just as important issue. It’s how your site is presented or introduced by others. If you had used the crazy long example I had above, or “Home Page”, others who found your content may choose to link to your site with their own title ideas. That’s fine, but you may not like it if the link was “Crappy Example of Site Title”, and the URL went straight to your home page. Give them a name, a.k.a. title, as an idea to use as the anchor text.
You must also not forget robots. Computers scouring the web for pages. They find your site, they list your site, and they use the title defined in your Meta. Hope you have a good one, because they may keep the cruddy one cached for a long time. Additionally, having a great title can often equal more clicks when your site is in a long list of others. That is a reason alone to come up with a good one. Help others and computers recognize your site for what it is, and give it a proper title. Encouraging action is not a crime against titles. Go for it!
I think one reason titles get abused and ignored, and often at the same time is because we don’t always see them. If they are too long they get cut off, and the really only place you see them in near entirety is in the applications main bar on top. Who looks there? Abuse gets kicked in by those trying to pimp their site out for search engines (oooh, that one extra placement of that keyword will slam dunk this site for #1), and nobody notices or complains. Soon enough, search engines figure it out, people figure it out, and the site dies before it even had time to begin.
What do I do when I start working on a new page? I start by creating a high quality title. That way, I know what I am working on.
Looking for a new search engine? Find.com is a relatively new search engine using Yahoo’s Application Platform. After testing many search terms I found all of the results to be very relative. Infact, I like the results a little bit more than Google’s on some of the terms. Good luck arguing that one though.
Because it’s using Yahoo’s Application Platform you can expect similar results as found on Yahoo, but it’s not exact. Testing the key phrase “Best Web Image”, my site, Find.com pulled up more relevant results than Google or Yahoo. I like that. It wasn’t like that for everything, but the results were excellent overall. The engine is geared to FIND. Meaning, the results seemed more geared to finding your keyword or phrase. The difference is when searching, not finding, on a search engine like Google, your results may be more topic oriented to your keyword, putting less emphasis on the keyword itself.
Another thing I liked about the site was the manner the results were displayed, big and easy to read. Sponsored results were clearly identified, and not blended into results like some sites do. Something I didn’t understand about the site though was it’s selection of categories displayed on the home page. They were not the normal categories you would expect for a general search engine, and they did not seem to have a logical order. I also did not like that they had the category, Holidays, on the home page, and then also posted a couple of categories that were holiday specific. They should just all fall under the main category, Holidays.
Forgetting the category issue I was very impressed with the results and also enjoyed the clean format.
I monitor all of my sites with Google Analytics, and here is another reason why. It’s the new beta Advanced Segment option. One of the things I like to analyze is my Top Content. By knowing what your top content is, you can see what is driving traffic to your site, and what is at least capturing your visitors interest. What if the page is simply keyword rich though? Are you just getting a bunch of search engine traffic that you are not really trying to capture? Basically, did you create a high quality page that all of your visitors like, or did you just get lucky with some keyword?
So with the new beta Advanced Segments that Google has you can see not just what your top content is, but what your top content is for your regulars. By selecting Direct Traffic or Returning Traffic, you can get a good idea what your regular visitors are doing. You can find what they like, and what makes them bounce out. What’s even better about this, is that you can select several sources, and it will graph them individually so you can see any similarity or differences. Don’t be surprised when you find the spikes are not the same.
After selecting your source, look at that bounce column to find out what your stinkers are. Compare them to the low bounce rate pages, and find out what the difference is. It could be anything, picture vs. no picture, less links vs. more links, layout, whatever. Depending on your site it could simply be the quality or subject matter of that page. There is most likely something though, so really look hard if it is not obvious.
Using the same method as above, but selecting Direct, Return, and Search, find out what pages are the real winners. After applying the filter to your Top Content scroll down to see the break down of bounces for each category. Make sure you check out the Exit percentage as well. You will probably find that your returning visitors have the lowest bounce rate, and that is to be expected. What you are looking for here though, is for the low bounce rate for all categories. These are your real winners because they are what the random search traffic visitor wants, and it’s what your regulars want. As before, compare these winners to the losers so you know what to do next time. There are a lot of different ways you can mix this, but it’s all thanks to the new beta Advanced Segments.
In the past I haven’t spent much time marketing BestWebImage.com, or working on its value. Lately though, I have had some more free time, and have started working/thinking of ways on how to do it. I’ve been considering adding a Technorati button to my site, but I just hate having all that kind of stuff on my site. Then I saw this site, Best Data Recovery Software, saw their authority rating, and decided I will be adding one very soon!
Because I have been considering the Technorati button for my own site I have been studying how other sites have been using the button on theirs, if they even did at all. Best Data Recovery Software, and data recovery in general has become a new interest to me, mostly because my hard drive has be making those scary noises you hear before its death. When I saw their Technorati button on the top left, I just had to check their rating, and then was thoroughly impressed.
The button is in a really great location for their site. It may have been just because I have been looking out for those buttons, but it was the first thing I saw on theirs. Now I just need to figure out where I am going to put mine. Best Web Image has the sad authority level of just 21. After I finish this post I will mark my calendar for a month from now, and will post the changes in my authority. Hopefully it will go up a few. Hint, Hint, Hint.
On a side note, Best Data Recovery Software also wrote an article about Find.com, a new search engine. Great name for a search engine, now I just have to see how well it works.
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