Recently, I had a good friend ask if I could help him set up an online store for his family business, selling floral supplies. His dad had been running it the good ol’ fashion way. With their success as-is, they wanted to duplicate that success online, too. I had them purchase a couple domains, one of them being discountfloralsupplies.com. This is the domain that would actually be hosted, because it had the best opportunity for SEO.
I had been experimenting with how influential certain elements of a website are for SEO. What single optimization items return the greatest SEO “bump” if you were to do only one thing. At this point, it was a good opportunity to test title tags with a brand new site.
I decided to set them up using Joomla for their CMS (Content Management System) to run the site. After a quick install I set up some test items for them so they could understand how the site works and begin building it and adding content.
After I turned the site over to them I made one change. That’s it. Just one SEO change. I updated the title tag to read “Discount Floral Supplies.” I left everything else. I left the default “Home – ” prefix in the title tag. I left the default meta description, keywords, etc. The only other benefit they had was the domain I suggested they buy was great, too.
The combination of those two (domain + title tag) was amazing. Amazing and fast. I had them buy the domain on May 28th, 2008.
Just four days later they were on page one of Google out of 1 million+ results for the term “discount floral supplies.”
The lesson to be taken is that title tags are very important. Personally, I would consider them one of the most important elements of SEO. Now, with the combination of that and a matching domain. You can hit a homerun for whatever your domain may be.
