How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag (Our 4-Step Process) by Joshua Hardwick #409

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. My name is Matt Bertram. That's it. Just good old Matt Bertram. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. We're going to call this our rodeo edition of our podcast, at least rodeo 2018 edition of our podcast. There was actually holding up, Matt was holding up the souvenir program from, I don't know, a while back. That's called a while back. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast, and we need to get a video of that tip, please, sir. All you need to do is turn on the LCD and then- The video is Google Stop Changing the Algorithms. Yeah. That's the tip. That's the tip. That's the tip to Google. Or if they change them, don't chase them. So put the LCD on and then the red button that's on that face. You can't stop in the middle of the podcast. I'm not stopping. People are watching. Keep talking. People are live. You keep talking. Hey. You got it? I got it. You got it? All right. This is live, filmed in Houston, Texas. As always, we have a tip, and our tip from our previous podcast is- Google Stop Changing the Algorithm. No, no. That's the real tip. Okay, fine. Stop chasing the algorithm. Just provide a great customer experience to Google, and you have nothing to worry about. We've been saying this on our podcast since the beginning. As long as you provide a good experience to the Google user, Google will look favorably upon you. So don't chase the algorithm. Chase your customers. Subscribe. Follow. Boom. I like that. All right. So what we will ask you, let's see. Oh, please remember, we are filming live here from Houston, Texas, and Matt and I, we are your Revolts Rebels. Hey, I wanted to throw in this review. This is a great review from Colton Bach. It is, of course, five stars. It says, great company with great services. I

am actively recommending them to everyone. So what I would recommend is that you become our customer really quickly. Because pretty soon, apparently, everyone is going to be our customer. I love it. Thank you, Colton. Punch in the face to you, Colton. We really appreciate that. Good God. If you like this podcast, and if this is your first time, you're going to know that you like this podcast really soon. If you've listened to this podcast before. We're not. Bye-bye. Bye. If you like the tips we give in this podcast, you would probably be interested in five online marketing mistakes that can take your business and how to avoid them. You can get such an article by going to eWebResults.com slash SEO tip. We have an amazing article for you today. It is good. It's one of our more technical articles, right? Yeah. I feel like it would be good to like draw stuff. Have a screen behind us and point and click. Yeah. I think that would probably be pretty good. This article is by Joshua Hardwick and what we'd like you to do, if you are near an electronic device, go ahead and tweet now. You want to include us, hashtag SEO podcast. This is number 409. Tag us at bestSEOPodcast at eWebResults and tag Joshua Hardwick. He's at Joshua C. Hardwick and that's H-A-R-D-W-I-C-K. So, J-O-S-H-U-A. Like it sounds. C-H-A-R-D-W-I-C-K. Are you trying to rush me? Is that boring? Is that long and boring? No, it's phonetic. It's like the phonetic. It is actually phonetic, isn't it? Joshua C. Hardwick. And let him know that you're listening to the best SEO podcast because you've tagged us already. Talk about his article. The article is how to craft the perfect SEO title tag. Yes, the perfect SEO title tag and it's a four-step process. There's more to it than meets the eye. Yeah. So, when you first read the title, you were probably like, this is going to be pretty quick and then you're like, wow, it's really good stuff. He definitely had some good

pictures and diagrams. I was overly impressed with the layout. Yep. He did a great job. So, again, if this is the first time listening to the podcast, not just because this is the Rory podcast, but because we like to say hello this way, howdy and welcome to the podcast. If you've listened to the podcast before, you know we run a competition each and every week and the competition is if we get 10 Shikos. Hey, Sharon, a like and a follow. If we get 10 Shikos and a review, then we move the part where we kind of tell you how to connect with us and all that stuff to the end. Guess what we're moving to the end today? That part. That part. So, we got 10 Shikos. Actually, we had like 130 likes on our Facebook page. Punch in the face to the efforts that are going on there. Appreciate it, everyone. And yeah, we already read a review. So, we're just going to wait until the end. We're not going to tell you that you could easily leave us a review at ewebresults.com No, I'm not going to do it. I don't care how much you ask. If you would like a free website analysis, we can get a free website analysis for you. Just go to ewebresults.com and then click the button that says free website analysis. It's pretty straightforward. That's an interesting title tag. I just have one short little piece of news. There's a Facebook algorithm change, right? Right? And it's like data's dropping off. So, there's a Facebook page called Little Things. They deliver viral content and they are reporting a 75% drop in traffic to their page. Ooh! That's a lot. So, yeah. No, no, no. Change is a book. Mark Zuckerberg, he said it's going to be the same. It's going to be the same. Yeah. Not for businesses. It's not. Same engagement. So, that's basically what it is. So, the engagement is going to be held to the same standards, as you said, as any other post.

But we're getting about 36% engagement and our social stuff's dropping as well. But we're still getting a bunch of likes because we're fighting the trend. We're fighting hard. One last thing. This guy, Joey, he submitted a web form on our website. It says, are you guys on vacation? What's taking so long with your next podcast? All I can say, Joey, is punch in the face to you for being so hungry for the information we're putting out there. We really appreciate you. Well, a lot of people come to the page to get it. And sometimes, we've hired another content writer. Yep. So, it's not updated. Yep, yep. So, that will not be a problem anymore. But if you go, typically, to YouTube or if you go to the archive page, it usually gets posted there automatically. And we have to move it over to the new page. So, just a thought. Yeah. You can, yeah. You can find it in other places. But, Chris does not stop the 1,000 mile march. Yes. Yes. I just keep- 10,000 miles. 10,000. 10,000 is a million mile march. That's what we're on. That's what we're on. And right now, we're on mile 409. All right. How many miles are in a podcast? I'm just kidding. So, what I would like it to be is somewhere where the math of 410 equals a million. And so, then we're like- So, we'll just divide the number. Okay. We'll figure it out next time. Make it nice and simple. All right. So, here's this article, How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title in Four Steps by Joshua Hardwick. This is really cool. Let's jump right in. The truth is title tags have more potential and SEO value than most people realize. So, potential value and SEO value than people realize. He gave an example. So, by the way, he works at Ahrefs. If you're kind of in our industry, you know what Ahrefs is. They kind of aggregate information. They've got a tool that they reference in here. We're going to probably

kind of blow through where he does the actual walkthrough of the tool. But Ahrefs is a really great source for information about search engine optimization for your website. And he gave this example where they had a title tag that was rank tracker dash Ahrefs, and then rank tracker by Ahrefs, check and track keyword rankings. Their ranking rose by...actually, their organic traffic rose by 37.6% when they made that change. He did add a caveat that they had changed some other stuff. And so, it might not be specifically to that. Well, every little thing you change... Yeah. ...it gives you a little bit of a multiplier. I think. So, here's a question. What are the SEO title tags? Right? So, when you look in the code... Uh-huh. Excuse me. I feel like this little thing in my throat. I might be coughing through some of this. But when you look in the code, the title tag is the piece that fits inside what's called the title tag. Right? So, you've got the title open bracket, and then you've got the title, and then you've got the title close bracket. That's your title tag. Its primary job is to tell visitors and search engines what they can expect from the web page in the shortest and most concise way possible. And I'm going to give him the example. You've got your duck lips on. So, here we go. That's the thing that gets seen on the Google SERP, right? Search Engine Result page. And it also gets seen when you post a particular URL on social media. By the way, those Pringles sound incredibly delicious. And when we were doing the soundtrack, I could hear you eating them. So, just be mindful. To chew with your mouth closed. So, it's essential that the title tag entices the user to click through to your post from the SERP, again, Search Engine Result page, or wherever it's getting posted. Here are some more reasons that title tags are important. First impression counts. Like, you ever heard that? I've heard that

before. Yep. It's the first thing people find, typically, and also brand leverage. So, if you can get your brand name in there, it's going to get more visibility with respect to, say, somebody searching for SEO and your particular brand comes up, you want your, or your page comes up, by getting your brand in there, if they see that over and over again, the brand, they may not click through to you on the first page, but they may click through to you on other pages. Man, he's wondering if you ate dinner before the podcast. I did not realize it was past dinner time, and you're absolutely right. He did something pretty interesting. So, I love these, when you get into the nitty-gritty and people do this type of research, and the research is that the keyword usage for what position you are in Google. So, it's saying if they did this survey, so they do a bunch of searches, and then they aggregate the data, and they say, those web pages that were in the first position, 26% of them had the keyword in the title, and that was in the first position, only 25% in the second position, 24, and so on, which seems kind of low, because one of our SEO tasks, and I know when we're talking with other SEOers, one of their tasks is to make sure you're taking care of title tags, almost every report that you will ever run on a page that's SEO-related will talk about the keyword not being or being in the title tag, and look at this. There's only 26% that are of the first position listings on a Google search result actually had the keyword in the title. Seems pretty low, right? Debate over. So, what's interesting is since Hummingbird, Google's smart enough to know the synonyms. So, I would submit that if you included synonyms of the keywords that were used to do the search, that absolutely, it would be significantly higher than that. So, conversational language is hugely important, and Google's starting to

catch the keyword density, and so really, you just got to kind of break it up. Conversational language, themes, synonyms, that sort of thing. Google, I think, is weighting a little bit higher from what I'm seeing. Very cool. So, you came to us as a PPC expert, right? Yes. You've clearly become an SEO expert, right? You had some good SEO skills. Was there any point where you thought, and because this is the next question, that title tags and H1 tags were the same? Yes. And, okay, let's see, I've got to do the search because of our ability. The H1 tag, I thought, was the heading tag. Well, I guess. It is, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, and it makes a lot of sense to have that confusion until you really get back in the back of the code. What you see is that the title tag, if you use Chrome, and you look at the tab of the Chrome for that particular webpage, that's typically the title tag. It gets displayed there. And then when you're, that's assuming you're on the page, right? Uh-huh. And then the main title in the page is typically the same thing. Yeah. And that's because typically, especially like in WordPress, your H1 tag gets pulled from the title of the page. Yeah. And so, you know, it makes sense. Yeah. But he did ask what's the difference, and the difference is that they're, you know, that they are in fact different. In fact, he shows a picture. Don't confuse this with the title tag that's visible in the tab of your browser. That is the title tag. And then what's actually the H1 tag on the page. So they can be different if you want them to be different. Yeah. Now, here's a, here's a good question. How long should a title tag be? Do you have an, yeah? I know I'm throwing you on the spot here, so. Well, I mean, how many characters? Yeah. How many characters? I don't know. Like 10? 12? I don't know. So, it's more

than 10, more than 12. 26. Actually, I got it. So, I've been watching with my kids a show called Brain Games. Okay. And one of the things that they did in this Brain Games, they were like, how many countries are Africa? I just want you to give me a range that guarantees that the accurate number is in there, right? Uh-huh. And so, what's the smartest answer? 50. So, the smartest answer is like 1 and 300. Okay. Right? Like, if you just say the smart, like, because you know the answer's in there. But people will say, ah, somewhere between 20 and 50. Yeah. Right? That's what I would say. And they're always wrong. Like, I don't know what the, it's like, I can't, I don't know what the country count is in Africa. But in this particular study, it was like- It's a lot. Yeah. How many, but what's interesting, and this is why, like, you didn't give a range that was big enough. Yeah. You over, you, humans tend to over trust their ability to guess things. Yeah. Right? Because if I ask you how many countries, give me a range that guarantees it, you're like, and you give like 30 to 50, there's no reason to do that. It means you think you're right. Yeah. And in reality, you're not right. I don't know. I thought that was fascinating. Well, I think what's interesting is what is the intent of what you're trying to achieve? So, is it long tail, right? Right. Is it moving the brand and everything up to the front? What are you trying to do? Right. You know, that's kind of my thought process of, okay, what are you trying to achieve with that is gonna dictate what you're gonna try to do. Right. So, he's asking this, and I asked this question in the context of what is keyword, I mean title, meta title etiquette, 50 to 60 characters. And the reason that 50 to 60 characters is important, and actually it can vary, is that, he gives the

example of a title tag that has the dot, dot, dot after it. So, like the title tag hasn't completed. And how that's not a great experience on the search engine result page. No. In terms of etiquette, he also says don't use all caps. He suggests sentence case or title case. And even in title case, yes, the odd every now and then put in an all cap word for emphasis is fine, but definitely don't wanna do all cap. It will get attention, but for the wrong reasons. What about Camelback or whatever it's called? I don't know what Camelback is. Where the first letter? Oh, that's the title case. Title case. Okay. I've heard it called like... Camelback, apparently. Camel, camel, camel. I don't know. Nevermind. I can see the parallel Camelback. Yeah, title case. And actually we've read some statistics like on titles and Facebook titles or whatever, that the title case is the best. So cap the first letter for the major words. You do that in everything PPC. Yep. Because it makes people read the whole thing. Yep. And then he goes, what is he? Write for humans. Here's what you wanna do with your titles. Make sure you're writing for humans, not for search engines. That was actually our tip, right? Make sure title tags are unique no matter what per page. Okay. That may not be that important. And make sure a title tag exists on all pages. And I say it may not be that important. So for if you've got like an about us and a contact us page, those might not be like pivotal things to have different title tags for. All right. So we wanna write the perfect, not a good, not a great. We wanna write the perfect SEO title tag. Let's get started. Just give it to Google. Just give it to Google. So it actually interested me at the end of this article, it's like, why does Google keep changing my title tag? It doesn't even matter. Like this whole podcast doesn't even matter who's

gonna rewrite it anyway. Don't ruin it. All right. So first, let's find a primary keyword to target. So targeting topics, he prefers targeting topics over keywords. We prefer targeting- Themes! Over keywords. Woo! I've been waiting to use that. He's been waiting to use that. Yeah. Correctly. Hey! It is correct. All right. In fact, he found that on average, number one ranked page will also rank well for thousands of other relevant keywords. Right? I thought that was pretty interesting. Right? I thought that was pretty interesting. So, and then he's got all these charts and I ignored all those charts, but he says, so what he's saying is, even though you may select a particular keyword and you get good placement on it, by doing it right, right? And that's the page in general, not just the title tag, you actually will end up placing in the first position or in good position for a whole slew of different keyword phrases. So. If you're good, you're good. Yep. All right. So let's say you have a keyword in mind, right? Okay. If you don't, then you should go to the keywords explorer at AHREF. I'm happy to promote them because they wrote this wonderful article. And then he goes and describes some of the things that he will do. Right? If you want to be on the podcast AHREFs, hey, SEMrush missed out. Yeah. All right. So, so step one was find like the keyword theme that you want to go after, right? The very short keyword theme you want to go after. Step two is find long tail versions of that keyword theme. You should always be targeting one primary keyword, but you should be usually targeting multiple long tail keywords. Why? Target one theme. Or one theme, right? Target one theme. So, so. But yeah, it's one keyword. Right? Because you're limited to the 40 or 50 characters or whatever it is. Yeah. Then you can't target the whole theme. So the question is why should you target some long tail phrases in addition to

the primary phrase? Because it takes a long time to rank for your main keyword and you can do well for those long term phrases a lot easier. These long tail variations can often be incorporated into your title tag without unnatural shoehorning, right? So you're not trying to take themes that don't make sense and shove them together. You're actually extending a particular one. One of the best tips I've seen with the content generation is if you're trying to rank for a particular word and you're trying to rank locally, use the word. Like, I mean, use Houston. Yeah. Use the local phrase. Like SEO Houston, right? Yep. That's easier to rank for than SEO nationally. Right. Absolutely. And so just adding little things in like that I think is helpful. So I've never kind of read, like I know the definition. I know I understand long tail key phrases, keywords, but I've never read a particular definition. And David McSweeney gave an example. Marcus, punch in the face. Long tail keywords are the search queries with very low individual search volume, but an enormous total search demand as a group. The name comes from the long tail of the so-called search demand curve, a graph that plots all keywords by their search volumes. So I was going to replace this with like Amazon. Okay. Well, Amazon, you know how they started, right? Right. So Amazon started going after all the rare books. Right. That were only like bought like 10 a month or whatever. Right. And they took that enormous amount of volume and rolled it up with no inventory. Right. And then work their way in. To like bigger books. Work their way in on the demand curve. Yeah. So like Amazon took advantage of this. It's like classic. I mean, it's. Well, and it's also like a lot of apps that do well or a lot of software or services that do well that you might see on Shark Tank. They'll tend to start in one place, right? So if we've got somebody who would

like to attack and we put together proposals for this to attack like a national campaign, we'll say, okay, well, let's choose a place. Yeah. Probably Houston to begin with so that you can concentrate your budget. And, and the reason that really like, this is a little sidetracked, but the reason that really works is we know that impression density is an important factor in terms of getting people to interact with you. And so if you spread your even a hundred thousand dollar budget across the country versus throwing it directly into Houston, you know, people see your, your brand a lot less. So, so I, I was, uh, at a talk and I was a VP of Coca-Cola, I think your marketing of Coca-Cola. And she made this analogy of like a focus beam of light. Yeah. Attracts moths. More moths. More moths than just light in the room. Yeah. Like it gives them a focus. They come to it and that sort of thing. Yeah. Absolutely agree with that. Um, he states that keywords tend to be longer and more specific than commonly searched phrases. Literally, we'd like to describe long tail key phrases as when the buyer is about to buy, when the prospect is about to buy, they're usually doing more long tail key phrases. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yes. Um, let's see. Head keywords. So SEO tips. So we're going to kind of walk through his example of what he puts together. So his lead keyword is SEO tips. He created two long tail variation, SEO tips for beginners and small business SEO tips. Okay. Uh, there's about a hundred searches per month for SEO tips for beginners and then 70 searches per month for SEO business, uh, small business SEO tips. Sounds like we should write an article. Then SEO tips 3,800. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're going to be writing an article about SEO tips for beginners. All right. So, so step one. Okay. Keyword theme. Step two, long tail phrases that you don't have to unnaturally wedge into that keyword theme, into

your title. Yeah. And number three, let's draft your basic title tag. Ooh, I like it. Yeah. So he says, uh, here are the rules. Focus on descript, descriptiveness. Okay. Okay. Keep it short and sweet, not to exceed 50 to 60 characters. I believe we covered that already. That's good. Include your keywords. It's good. Whoa. I like this. This is good. All right. So he's going to, their article is their list of 75 SEO tips. So after step three, we're at 75 SEO tips for 2018. Um, yeah. Yeah. No, go on. I got some. So, so he includes, what he does with that is he includes the main key, the main keyword. Okay. Right. Which in his case, what was his main keyword? He said his main keyword was, uh, no, I think it was SEO tips, right? SEO tips. SEO tips. It's SEO tip. And then he also include one of the tail, tail words, which was, uh, SEO tips for beginners. No, small business SEO tips. No, he changed the, the game on us. Oh, this one's. Yeah. So, so really what he ended up doing, he said, uh, Google is smart. So, so this incorporates both the primary keyword of SEO tips and the long tail of SEO tips 2018. So interestingly, he ended up changing that in his article because he didn't include the long tail of 2018. See how confusing this is everyone? Oh, there we go. He's very confusing. He did get to it. All right. Again, SEO tips was the primary and SEO tips 2018 was the longer tail keyword that he's going after. Uh, and now one point he says is, you can recognize that because you have 75 SEO tips for 2018. Okay. Just because there's a four in between SEO tips 2018, right? Uh-huh. So it's not the actual keyword. Uh-huh. Google is smart enough to understand that when you include 2018, you must be talking about tips that are fresh and relevant to 2018. So I think that's, I think that's good. Yeah. Well, so

that, so like, what is it? Tip 2018, or how does it do SEO? Oh, it's SEO tip. Tip 2018. Well, you probably want to do SEO tip 2018. Right. So that's, that, that was his long tail, SEO tips he's writing on the board back here. SEO tips 2018. Uh-huh. And because it says SEO tips for 2018, you're like, hey, wait, your keyword's not exactly right. Uh-huh. It's all right. Google understands that 2018 means 2018. And if you're doing paid, man, Google will say, yeah, you mean that? I'm gonna kill you for it. I'll throw everything at it, yeah. Be careful. All right. So, so one of the things that he said is that, let's see, how to choose the best and worst protein powder. So if you're gonna make a short, this step is to make a short title and he's saying best protein powder, you can do how to choose the best and worst protein powder, right? So let's change it up a little bit. Or use a synonym, how to choose the best and worst protein shake instead of powder. And best protein powder is the core phrase you're going after. So you can put modifiers in, you can mix it up. It's kind of like a phrase match. Yeah. Yeah. And then Google does a great job, as you guys probably know, of inferring the searcher's intent, knowing what you're talking about. Uh-huh. All right. So step number four, look at what's unique about your content and tell people about the uniqueness of your content, right? So here are five qualities, five qualities that people tend to value, depth and thoroughness. So we all know that really good content, we call it pillar content, is one of the phrases that we'll use, ranks really well in Google. So what you'll find out, and this is Neil Patel is a master at like pillar content. Yeah. It's really in-depth and thorough content. So that's got value. People recognize that. I want to just go to one article, read it, know everything about it,

and then I can stop reading about it. Yeah, that's me. That's one. Number two, lists and quantity. People love lists and posts. Yeah. Absolutely. Next is speed and brevity. So you may like really comprehensive content, but there's a whole slew of people who are like, okay, I just need the five-minute overview, or I need something fast, I need something dirty. Yeah. And he's saying, let's see, I think he goes into quick, simple, X minutes, today, now, is really important. Next, he says freshness. Oh, I like that. As an example, SEO tips 2018 would be fresh. Nobody's gonna click a result from 2012 for such a query, so make sure you're updating your content, keeping it evergreen. Relevant. And then finally, he mentions brand, and brand is something that's probably not talked about enough in SEO. People love brands. More importantly, because people love brands, Google loves brands, right? So people are more likely to click a search result from a brand that they know and trust. Absolutely. Alright, so one of the things that, to kind of put into here, maybe if your target market is interested in cheap, or maybe they're interested in really high-quality stuff, that's gonna adjust, or luxury, exactly, that's gonna adjust what you might do. So best, he gives the example of best, so what if you don't know what your audience is interested in, or what people who read based off of that key phrase are interested in, how could you figure that out? Show everything. Do a Google search. Oh, yes. Right, so we all know that when people tend to click the particular listing over and over again Google moves it up, and so what you know from searching the phrase you're targeting is what people who type in that phrase are looking for. And so then you can appeal to them. So there's a book out there, I think it's called like Everybody Lies, or something like that. I just recently finished it. I feel like you just made that up. No, I'm serious. It's kind

of like an elephant on it. Is that a lie? And it's like a Freakonomics, like it's a Freakonomics 2.0. Oh yeah, like economics-driven. Yeah, and it's all about Google searches. Right. And it really gives some very creative insight into what's going on. So this guy got all this data, and peeled it apart, and talking about some pretty controversial topics. But it really is interesting, he said that like the Google bar is basically like a confession bar. Right. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can find out what people are thinking, and it keyed in my memory of that when you said that. Very cool. Yeah, I actually need to, well give me that book, because I want to read it. I love the Freakonomics books are pretty phenomenal. Yeah, I enjoyed it, so. So he's kind of taken his notes here, right, and remember these five things that you want to kind of sell to your audience, depth and thoroughness, lists and quantity, speed brevity, freshness and brand. So now he's taken his previous 75 SEO tips in 2018, to 75 SEO tips that work in 2018. I think that's better, right? I like it. By adding the phrase, that work in 2018, the title tag is now showing freshness, it's up to date, and it's gonna work, right? But this title tag also incorporates a couple of other qualities too, depth and thoroughness, 75 SEO tips is a pretty thorough list. I mean, you go to our page, you only get five. They're pretty awesome, they're pretty important, but it's not 75, right? But people like lists. Yeah. People like to walk away with like information of value. Yeah. And lists generate that. Yeah. He said, he even did a search for like just SEO tips, and the top four things are these nine SEO tips, 100 SEO tips, 101 quick and actionable SEO tips, 12 important SEO tips. So people want lists. People want lists. They feel like it's value. And so it's really good for like lead magnets and that sort of thing.

Okay. So here's what to do once you rank in the top 10. So you get that up to the top 10. Okay. You need to start making some adjustments, right? And here are a few ways to increase your click-through rate. So one is, okay, Google appeal to the algorithm and get there, but we know that we've gotta increase the click-through rate and make sure that people stay there. That's another topic altogether. So hook the reader in by adding emotion to the title. Ask me, how do you add emotion to a title? Pain. Pain. Well, that's actually probably two. We look like we've gone blank. That's kind of, oh. No, it's your phone. Oh. It's just updating. You know why? It's fine. At some point we said, okay, Google. And the Android device. And the Android device. Alexa. Stop it. That's funny. Oh, my phone's just dead. Intermission. There we go. There we go. There we go. It's the rodeo intermission. All right. There we go. All right. We're back. All right. So emotion. Amazing. Remarkable. Magic. Extraordinary. I don't know. Unknown secrets of internet marketing. There we go. Mystery. What does the content offer that's unique? What pain points do people searching for this query have? Right? So kind of address those. So he ends up now. We've kind of changed from 75 SEO tips to 75 SEO tips in 2018 to 75 actionable SEO tips that work in 2018. All right. So I think I love it. This is a really well put together article. Yeah. I like it. Again. How he built it. We gotta do a punch in the face for Joshua Hardwick. Yeah. Pretty awesome. Yeah. Appreciate it. All right. So next he even says, add brackets in parentheses. So we know when we create sections on a web page, like individual sections, that people are more likely to continue to read or skim through those sections, right? Uh-huh. And find the sections they like. That's what the brackets in parentheses do. So now it's 75 actionable SEO tips, in parentheses,

that work in 2018. It just breaks up the pieces of information so people are more likely to process those pieces of information. Yeah. And if they can process the information, then they're gonna click through. Number three of this section, I've kind of lost where we're at of what three. I need to take a look at my article here, I'll tell ya. Yeah. So this is what you do after you rank in the top 10, right? So number one was to hook the reader by adding emotion. Okay. Number two was on this previous page to add brackets in parentheses. I like it. Great idea. And number three is use the curiosity gap to entice the click. Ask me what the curiosity gap is. What's the curiosity gap? Well, let me just give you an example of the curiosity gap. I think that's the best way to do it. Here's the title. He found out his son had cancer. Google workers answered with this unbelievable kindness. It leaves you like, wait, I need to know this. What is that unbelievable kindness? Storytelling. Love it. Yeah, it's about storytelling, right? Right. And one of the things he says is, you want to engage this curiosity gap. Okay. Make sure you're not lying. Yeah. Right. So his title could have become 75 SEO tips for 2018 that Google really doesn't want you to know about. Cool. That's good too though. It's really powerful. Yeah. But it's not true, right? Like Google doesn't care if you know about these 75 tips, right? So it's probably... People... There's so many articles named that. Yeah, exactly. 75 SEO. So he really said, if you want to engage this curiosity gap, 75 SEO tips for 2018 that Google... No. That work like a charm in 2018. Well, no. I mean, people do that all the time. Yeah. They're like, SEO is dead. And then they talk all about SEO. Oh, yeah. And how valuable it is. Yeah. I just saw one about social media. It's kind of like clickbait. They're like just... They're

faking you out. Like, I really want... If you're going to say that, like I really want to hear... Why you believe it's actually true, as opposed to like knowing that you just used it to get me here. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like using all caps, right? It gets attention. It just gets the wrong kind of attention, I think. Yeah. And then number four here is front load your keywords, right? So if you need to have your keywords, right, in your title tag, make sure they're near the front. And why do you want to do that? It catches their attention. So if they searched for SEO tips, you want to make sure SEO tips is really early in that title tag. It could be a ranking factor, right? So what they're saying is they don't know if it's a ranking factor. It used to be, yeah. How close it is to the beginning. It could be, so include it. I just think that a lot of these changes, okay, have been tweaked, but they're still the fundamental of the engineering when it was built. Oh, yeah. It's there. It's there. It's still there. There's still footprints of it. They can't completely get rid of it. It would be crazy to do that. Yeah. And then another reason to front load your keyword, it can result in more keyword-rich links, right? Because sometimes when people link to your website, they just use the title when they link to your website. And so when they use the title, that's clearly gonna be a keyword-rich link to your website. That's probably the most powerful thing I've heard right there. Yeah. Very cool. Do that. Now here's the front-loaded version of their SEO tips article, right? So the last version we had was 75 actionable SEO tips that worked like a charm in 2018. Now he's got SEO tips, colon, 75 actionable SEO techniques that work in 2018. This would be good to have up on the board to follow along. Yep. And then, remember we mentioned that include

brand if it's relevant. A lot of SEO people know Ahrefs. So he really ended up with 75 actionable SEO tips, in parentheses, that work like a charm in 2018, in parentheses, dash Ahrefs. Brand. I like it. Yeah. So it's really, really good. He did go into, do you have something? No. I just think the research or the thought process here is really good. It's phenomenal. Yeah. It's really phenomenal. We got in his head. He shared it. I can tell you that when you're putting title tags together, you might, we were discussing insurance earlier this week, one of our clients. And like, so you're like, yes, home insurance for the home insurance page. How do you make it better? And this is a nice process to make you think about how to make it better. How do we add emotion? Instant? Or how do you appeal to each of the things that he's covered? We'll just send him this podcast. Joshua's code. Be right here. Go listen to this. Just listen to this and he'll walk you through it. Absolutely. So he did give some ideas. I'm not gonna go into these about what you could do from an e-commerce perspective. Just know that there are plugins for like WordPress, Joomla, and Magento that will allow you to like use components like category, product, product name, product description you probably don't wanna use. It's probably gonna be too long for a title tag. But allow you to create those so that then the default meta title is exactly what you would like it to be. Cool. So that was pretty good. Yup. And then finally, like we mentioned, Google changes your title sometimes, right? Yeah. They changed it a lot. Yeah. And so Google, why would Google change your title? And so he covers this. He says, one, Google thinks that your title tag sucks. That would be a reason, like your title tag sucks. Google thinks that there's a more suitable title tag for your particular query. And I love the example he gave. He

gave the example, if you search for Zappos, if you look on the Zappos homepage, obviously, which comes up, their title tag is online shoes, clothing, free shipping and returns, so it's a good reason to put your keyword in the front to begin with. Yeah. There's a bunch of people in that. Yeah. The right, the right, the right, the right. Right. And you can see it's a little bit about Zappos. That's a little bit about Zappos. Yeah. So it's a little bit about Zappos, but what Google displays on the SERP is Zappos.com, online shoes, clothing, free shipping and returns. So Google understands that people, when they're looking for Zappos, they probably want Zappos, so even Google will adjust your already pretty good title tag to put the keyword in the front. Yeah. It's a good reason to put your keyword in the front to begin with. I think just Google, like, it's gotta help people drive a little bit on the website builds and what they're doing. Yeah, yeah. And then finally, Google is looking at the anchor text of your inbound links to determine the topic. So sometimes those websites that are linking to you, Google use the anchor text of those in order to actually adjust your title tag. And of course, one of the biggies here is why does Google adjust your title tag? Well, if you don't have a title tag, they put their own title tag. And I think there's some stat in here about how many of these pages don't actually have title tags. And Google does a really good job of cleaning these up. So I really wanted to highlight the koala bear. Oh, yeah. Like the koala bear. That was really infotainment for me. I think it should have been in the title. It should have been. I thought, like, we could have talked about the koala bear the whole time. Yeah, I think it should have been like, SEO tips, 75 actionable SEO tips that work like a charm in 2018. Poor koala bears. Age refs. Poor

koala bears. And a cute koala bear. I think you add that there. See, Google's like, nope. You may have exceeded the character count, but I think it's a viable option. And finally, how can I stop Google from rewriting my title tags? You can't. So don't worry about it. Joshua Hardwick, punch in the face to you. This was a phenomenal article. Yeah, I really liked your thought process. Please tag him, at Joshua C. Hardwick on Twitter. And then we've got our wrap-up stuff. That was impressive. I was a little fearful, but my drawing, I think, really helped. I'm going to go with no comment. All right, so we're wrapping up our podcast. If you like this podcast, please tell three people about it right now. Just three, anybody who's a business owner or they're in search engine optimization or they do marketing or whatever, just let them know about our podcast. If you are trying to grow your business, we suggest that you do it with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet. The internet, yes. Call ER Results for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, somebody who's interested in any aspect of internet marketing, send them to us. They come to us, they pay us, we pay you. That is our referral program or donate to a charity. And donate to a charity, but we are hiring contract sales reps in that fashion. So just give us a call if you have an interest. And that's anywhere in the country. We're in H-Town, but if you're anywhere in the country. We have clients nationally and we're expanding. So, very cool. Please remember we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. You can get a transcript, video, and audio of this podcast on our website, ewebresults.com. I like that. I had to throw that in there. My voice was feeling good. Yeah. All right. Wow. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast in the known universe because of

you guys. We actually got on another list recently. Ahrefs. Ahrefs list, right? Yeah. I think we did. Yeah. So. And we're reading their article. Whoa. And we're reading their article. There's some reciprocity. Serendipitous reciprocity. So, because of you, we're the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Thank you, guys. Thank you for connecting with us, sending us questions, for being around, and having us move that piece to the end. We're just going to skip it all together. You know how to get a hold of us if you're watching this. Uh, until the, it is rodeo season, so I'm about to head to the rodeo. Until the next podcast, my name is Christopher Rose. My name is Matt Brookstrom. Bye-bye for now. I think she's gonna set me free. She's my.