When people ask me how they should start optimizing their website for search engines, I tend to respond that they should begin with the optimization of their home page title. I still see a lot of websites with a home page named “Home”. What a waste… I’ve managed to help quite a few small businesses rank better in search engines by only changing their home page title. These websites have no or few competitors, but their owners wouldn’t take advantage of the situation.

Keywords first

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Most websites have a home page title with the website name first, then the keywords: “Marketing Meerkat – Internet Marketing Blog”. I believe in putting the keywords first, then the website name: “Internet Marketing Blog – Marketing Meerkat”. Maybe you don’t even need to put the website name. Unless branding is a key element of your strategy, you should definitely think about it. What do web users want to know first? Who you are? Or what you do?

Don’t forget that when doing a search on Google, the keywords you’ve typed in are highlighted in bold on results pages. Showing up on results pages is good, but getting some attention is better!