Website and Web Page Titles
Your website title is one of the first things that major search engines look for when ranking your page. When your title and description accurately reflect your content, (which should also be fabulous,) it drastically improves the chances that your web page rank will rise like fresh baked blueberry muffins. That’s not enough though. You’ll also need a website title that’s noticeable and makes people want to know more and click through to your site.

Think local. If your business is in London, make a specific appeal to London and the surrounding area. People all over the world will still want to view your website for its valuable information. However, it makes good business sense to make a local appeal too since people are more comfortable making purchases from companies that are close by.

List your business name and some important keywords in your title. Small and New businesses list keywords first. Larger and well known businesses can list their name before the keywords. i.e.: A small business may write: Best gourmet coffee in Maine at Schmoe’s Joe. While a larger company may say: Schmoe’s Joe: Best gourmet coffee in Maine.

For every page on your website, use a different tagline with keywords that you know people will look for. i.e.: Schmoe’s Joe: About Our Gourmet Coffee Company, Schmoe’s Joe: Buy Gourmet Coffee Online, Schmoe’s Joe: Gourmet Coffee Accessories.

Website titles should be as short as possible. Don’t try to squeeze ten keywords in to one headline. You are more likely to get better results with one or two quality keywords than you will with half a dozen of them. This is mostly due to the fact that web surfers are looking for instant information. They don’t typically read that much into a headline anyway. In order to get lots of quality keywords associated with your site, use the method above and put a different keyword in the title of every page.

Content, Blog and Article Headlines
According to John Caples, author of “Tested Advertising Methods,” There are three major types of titles that attract the most clicks:

1) News Headlines:
It is human nature to seek out information and find out what is happening in their world. News headlines offer objective facts which make readers feel more knowledgeable and in control of their environment. Examples are: “Celebrity Searches Lead to Malware” “New Remote Application Available for iPhone and iPod” and “Buy New Wii at Discount Stores”

2) Curious Monkey:
Everyone has a little curious monkey inside their head distracting them from the task at hand and telling them to click on the video of the skateboarding dog. Headlines like “Cat Declared Hero” “$80M Disaster” or “Bubble Boy Lives!” can get people’s attention pretty quickly.

3) Self Interests:
This is the most effective since readers are interested in things and ideas that they will personally benefit from. It appeals to a need, a want or an ego. For instance: “Learn Spanish in Two Weeks” “Retire Ten Years Early” or “Affordable Mansions”

When appealing to the “self-interest” spectrum, beware of overuse. Consumers and web surfers have become fairly desensitized to marketing and advertising on the internet, if not extremely wary and cynical. Over-sell it and they may think you’re a scam operation. There needs to exist a delicate balance between a quality product and an intelligent, subtle yet strong appeal to their ego and desire. It all comes down to finding what kind of tone your demographic responds to. Do they want something edgy and fresh, subtle and intelligent, or maybe they are more likely to click on a headline that is funny and bizzare

Remember, you don’t have to be #1 on the search engine’s list to get the most clicks.  It’s better to have a few high quality keywords and an appealing headline than a title that is too vague or contains too much information.

Universal search brings together components of web, book, blog, video, news and many more different types of search onto the one results page, all blended seamlessly so that the average Joe doesn’t know the difference between one or the other, they simply get results tailored to their search query from various different sources.

The interesting question facing marketers, is how to take advantage of these new elements, which feature prominently within SERPS? Do you focus your time on optimizing video content, tagging images, writing a blog, publishing ebooks?!?

Need an example of universal search? Try searching Google.com for “los angeles bars” and this is what you will see:

Universal Search Example:

Ok, so we now know what universal search optimization can cover, basically any kind of web content so here is my guide to help priotize your online content efforts, in order of easiest to hardest.

1. Tagging your images: This is a no brainer and one of the easiest ways to start to get some additional traffic from the search engines. Tagging all images contained on your website with the correct alt text and description fields, gives you the opportunity to basically show a banner ad at the very top of a search result, if Google deems your image to be highly relevant.
2. Optimizing video content: Make your video useful or informational (Don’t waste users time), tag your video with popular terms which relate to the content, keep the video short and to the point, put your logo on the video and always ensure that you name your video so that it is relevant to the content and the keywords associated with it. Another great tip is to always include your videos in a “video sitemap” so that the search engines can find it all and finally use html to describe the contents of your video because search engines still love HTML best!
3. News content: If Google or Yahoo or any other news aggregators, truly think your site is newsworthy, they will generally add you to their index on their own, however for the majority of us it’s a matter of writing content, building up a reasonable level of quality and then submitting for approval. Once approved, news based search results can deliver lots of relevant traffic and the same old rules apply, write good quality, keyword rich, feature articles and make them worthwhile for users to read.
4. Local search: Getting listed within local search results can be as simple as adding your website to the local business ads section index within your adwords account, the reason that i put this as #4 was because you generally have to pay for the listing on a per click basis. However Google will also give you that one, free, map based link if you claim ownership of your business address, via a verification process. Click here for more information on Local business ads
5. Book search: Now this is a tougher one, simply because you have to take the time to write a book! It’s not as easy as it sounds but if you have the time, write a book on something you are truly passionate about, something you have a strong opinion on and then publish it as a PDF. Do your research and find popular phrases, using tools like wordtracker or keyword elite and featuring these phrases heavily within your original content. Once you have written your book, published it, it looks all pretty. Register it for a Google book ID and you are done, if people are searching for phrases which are highly relevant to your publication, there is a good change your book will be shown.

If you currently use a third party search agency to optimize your website, make sure you ask them what they are doing for your universal optimization, be proactive and findout their guidelines and strategies and ask questions about where they think the future is heading and get in before your competition does.

Those tips above are useful, but the most important thing to remember when optimizing your search marketing, is to try and deliver unique, meaningful content to users. Google and Yahoo both love to deliver the freshest, most useful webpage’s to their users, so if you write it (and optimize it properly) they will come.