Association of Internet Marketing & Sales Page Title Tags Case Study

Do what I say, not what I do. There is a recurrent idea that keeps coming back to me over the last few months about web marketing geeks preaching everywhere about what to do in the area of corporate blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media and so on, but are not following these best practices for their own site. I believe this does not bring much credibility in the long run and we need to clean up our act. Over the last few years, I have been observing how regular business people (non-geek) tend to isolate us in a silo and usually take everything we say with a grain of salt. We are used to see skepticism in discussions with potential clients. Maybe we are partially responsible for this. Potential clients would question our motives since we are not doing for our own sites what we want to do for them. The Association of Internet Marketing & Sales is a very good example.

I was browsing around today and I came across the Association of Internet Marketing & Sales website and notice how bad their page titles are.

Here is why:

Use of the word Home in the page title for their “Home Page” (Home is referred as a stop word)

All page titles are written backwards, with the more specific information & keywords about a page are at the end of the page title

Page titles length not optimized (66 characters)

Choice of keywords for each page title does not increase the likelihood of being found, based on the content of every page

Page titles are the easiest thing you can work on in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan. It is also the fastest thing you can change and tweak in order to attract more visitors to your site from organic sources (free traffic). As I pointed out in one of my last posts on the impact of universal search on eye tracking & scanning patterns on a typical SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it shows how important it is to have the content of any page clearly labeled in the first few words on the vertical axis. That can easily be done by putting the keywords related to any given page of your site in the first few words of your page titles, followed by the common theme of your entire site. It this easy enough? This is the first rule in SEO and I can’t wait to see all web marketing professionals following it. 

Permalink /// Comments (9)

Comments

1. Those are pretty useful basic SEO tips, thanks. Another really useful thing that I’ve found for SEO is to make the URL’s have the keyword for the website and use h1 tags that include the keyword as well.

   Posted by Srini on 04/02 at 10:16 PM

2. Hey Srini ! You may found posts more interesting on this site about SEO… This site helped me to learn lots of interesting and helpful essentials things about SEO.

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3. Precise info on SEO & SEM and tips on how its been practised widely..  Xcellent stuff and thanks for sharing Alexandra .. Keep sharing more…

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   Posted by Roselin on 05/01 at 03:23 AM

4. Hi Alexandra, very nice article on SEO & SEM. I’m a starter to SEO and this article very useful to me. Thanks for sharing..

   Posted by Cathy on 05/25 at 02:10 AM

5. Sorry for a dumb question, but I really can’t get, what XMPP is?…

   Posted by Clayton D Rodriguez on 06/18 at 04:03 AM

6. Thanks for sharing here…

   Posted by SEO Company India on 10/31 at 10:46 PM

7. hi Alex,
   It cracks me up to see “experts” not doing what they tell everyone else to do (sounds just like politicians). The title is the MOST important thing on a webpage, and one must have the important keywords at the beginning. This is SEO 101. I clicked through to the site you linked to. They’ve had a year since you first posted this, and they haven’t changed their titles…
   ~ Steve, aka “portable trade show exhibits”
   PS. Thanks for letting me comment!

   Posted by Steve | portable trade show exhibits on 12/14 at 05:33 PM

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   Posted by Internet Marketing Services on 03/26 at 06:11 PM

9. Internet marketing differs from magazine advertisements, where the goal is to appeal to the projected demographic of the periodical, but rather the advertiser has knowledge of the target audience.

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