Page titles are a critical and often overlooked part of web marketing and search engine optimization. If you have ever tried to find a business on the Web by typing the name of the business into Google or another search engine only to be confronted by dozens of pages that refer to that business — with none of them actually providing a link to the business’s website — then you are familiar with missing or weak page titles.

Many web pages have default values like “Untitled Document” or “New Page 1″ as their title. The title displays along the top of your web browser. Few people even notice it. But search engines definitely notice page titles. The title is one of the first places a search engine like Google looks to determine what a web page is about.

The page title is one of the first things search engines look at to determine what a web page is about. Many web designers forget or don’t know about the importance of page titles, hence the prevelance of (totally useless) default page titles like “Untitled Document” and “New Page 1″.

If a business’s website does not show up on the first page of results when you type the business name (and the city the business is in if it’s a common name) into a search engine, the business name is probably not in the title of the website’s home page.

If you don’t know how to change your website’s page titles, see Web Marketing Tip #5 (coming soon) or comment on this post and I will get to it right away!

If you are using a website building tool on a service like Register.com or Yahoo! Geocities that makes it difficult to change page titles, then it’s time to get a new hosting setup! Your new customers will thank you.

Web Marketing Tip #4 is “Use Keywords in Web Page Titles” because the name of your business is obviously not the only thing people search for when looking for businesses like yours. If yours is a local brick and mortar business, put your address in the page title of your home page, or at least the city, state and Zip code. If you are the business owner and you want people to find your business’s website when they search for your name — put that in the title as well.

For example, note that “Mark McLaren” is in the title of my McBuzz Communications website home page and my McBuzz Communications blogspot blog. If you Google “mark mclaren”, you will find both sites on page one. (Search results vary from week to week. Right now I’m on page one.)

Don’t use the same title for every page in your site. Tailor page titles to the content of each page. One of the great features of WordPress is that it creates page titles for you automatically. Put keywords in the titles of your posts and they appear in your page titles as well.

If you have a local business in a particular neighborhood, use that neighborhood name in your page titles. In many cases, this will do wonders for your position in search results.

Of course, you want to use keywords in lots of other places besides page titles, but — first things first — page titles are a great place to start.

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Search engine optimization is a cornerstone of web marketing. Just as strides have been made in PDF accessibility for people with disabilities (see Matt May on Web Accessibility), improvements in Adobe Acrobat Professional and other PDF programs make it easier to optimize PDF files for websites and search engines.

Search engines read and catalog PDF files just like they do standard web pages. Many businesses create a lot of content as PDF files, and they don’t necessarily have time to convert these into HTML for inclusion on a website. Optimizing PDF files for websites (i.e., search engines) is a good compromise and well worth the trouble.

Using Adobe Acrobat Professional, PDF documents can be optimized with many of the same techniques used to optimize web pages.

For details, check out Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines on SearchEngineLand.com.

Not all of these tips make sense to someone with limited or no web marketing / development experience. If you have questions, just give me a shout using the Comments and I will answer them ASAP.

OPTIMIZING PDF FILES FOR SEARCH ENGINES IS NOT THE SAME AS OPTIMIZING PDF FILE SIZE
It’s worth noting that some of the most highly ranked web pages you find when you search using keywords like “optimizing pdf files for search engines” are more than two years old and they deal only with optimizing PDF file size.

Where PDFs are concerned, file size has almost nothing to do with search engine optimization. PDF files that have a high number of pages may be less likely to be completely scanned by search engine spiders* because they may have trouble getting through all the pages. So, it’s a good idea to break large PDFs into sections with fewer pages. But reducing PDF file size by compressing images in the file, which is basically what these articles are talking about, is not going to help optimize the PDF for search engines at all.

*A “spider” is web page reading software used by Google and others that “crawls” the World Wide Web, collecting and cataloging information so it can be used to rank a web page’s relevance for a given search.

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If you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, here are two privacy problems (security vulnerabilities) you should know about.

Most PC users use Internet Explorer. If you don’t know which web browser you are using, you are probably using Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) comes installed with the Windows XP operating system. Internet Explorer version 7 (IE7) comes installed with the Windows Vista operating system.

Internet Explorer version 7 asks you if you would like to make the contents of your clipboard available to a webpage that tries to access it. Version 6 just hands over the info without asking.

Internet Explorer Security Vulnerability Number One
IE6 and IE7 allow your Windows clipboard to be read by a third party that knows how to exploit this vulnerability. Microsoft learned about the problem in IE6, but rather than eliminate it in IE7, Microsoft chose to make it an optional “feature”. In other words, when you visit a web page that tries to access your clipboard using IE7, Windows asks you if you want to allow it. If you are using IE6, Windows does not even ask. It just hands over the information. Scary, huh?

Try this harmless test to see how it works. Put something in your clipboard by highlighting any text in a Word document or text document — or even this web page you are reading right now. With the text highlighted, press the CTRL key + letter C to copy the text, or go to the Edit menu and select Copy. Next, go to this web page: IE Clipboard Plunder.

If you are using IE7, you will get a message asking if you want to allow the web page to access your clipboard. If you are using IE6, you won’t get this message. You will simply see the contents of your clipboard displayed in a pink box to show you that the info has been stolen.

Of course, a malicious web page is not going to tell you that it has stolen the contents of your clipboard! Makes you wonder when the last time was that you had sensitive information in you clipboard while surfing the Web, doesn’t it?

Internet Explorer Security Vulnerability Number Two
If you use Internet Explorer (both IE6 and IE7) for FTP (to download files from your own website to your computer so that you can make changes and then upload them back onto the site), it embeds your FTP username and password in the source code files it downloads (.htm and .html). When you upload these files back to your website, the username and password are visible to anyone who views the source code in a web browser. Bottom line: Don’t use Internet Explorer for FTP.

How Are Internet Explorer Security Vulnerabilities Relevant to Web Marketing?
On some old-school websites, you can still find statements like, “This website best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher” or, worse, “This website only displays properly in Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher.” The days of requiring visitors to use a particular browser are, for the most part, a thing of the past, although some banks and other sites with secure information still feel the need to require visitors to use Internet Explorer. Given the clipboard theft vulnerability in Internet Explorer, this is fairly ironic — even irresponsible.

One of the primary reasons Web surfers choose the Firefox browser is its improved security over Internet Explorer. Firefox does not have either of the vulnerabilities noted above. According to some sources, about 13% of those using the Internet now use Firefox. It’s a fair generalization to say that people using Firefox are more aware of security threats posed by malicious websites, phishing scams, etc. By tracking the behavior of people using different browsers, you can come up with some interesting results. For instance, Internet Explorer users may be more likely to click on online ads.

All web analytics programs, including Google Analytics, tell you the type of browser people are using when they visit your site. A more technically oriented audience is more likely to be using Firefox. If you are trying to reach the layperson, and half of the visitors coming to your site via search engines are using Firefox, you should consider changing the language on your site to appeal more to a lay audience.

You can read more on Security Fix, Brian Krebs’ washingtonpost.com blog:

Clipboard Data Theft Optional In IE 7

Internet Explorer and Your Web Site’s [FTP] Privacy

This post was originally created August 8, 2007. The Relevance to Web Marketing section was added September 2, 2007. 

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