The title of a blog post is extremely important.  Most blogging software takes the title and uses it both internally and external in the management of content.  Some places where the title of the blog appears are:

• The URL of the post.
• The H1 title or the actual post titles that a reader sees.
• The HTML title tag

The problem you will find in most blog posts is that the HTML “title tag” is the single most important piece of content to a search engine but is often written to target human interests.   HTML title tags should be strategically used to drive search engine traffic versus copy that entices human readers.  According to a post in High Rankings, Title tags are considered to be in the big three which also includes visible copy and inbound link anchor text.  Still they are often overlooked by web masters and amateur bloggers.

Most blogging software and websites will allow title tags to be defined independently of content.  This is very important as humans and search engines are two different audiences.  I’m going to use a post on the website/blog of McCuistion TV as an example.

On October 25th, 2009, McCuistion TV broadcast a show on addiction which featured Chris Lawford Kenedy.   The title of the show was “The Causes of Addiction”.  The title of this show is excellent for human beings in that it is a teaser eluding to the fact that the show will reveal some of the causes of addiction.  From a search engine perspective, however, this title leaves a lot on the table.

The 2 word keyword pair “addiction causes” gets about 5,400 searches a month in Google.  The downside is that there are over 10 billion pages associated with this keyword pair in Google’s index.  Chris Lawford Kennedy gets about 2,000 searches per month and Chris Lawford Kennedy adiction only has 38,000 pages associated with it.  Though there are more searches associated with “addiction causes” the real opportunity is around Chris Lawford’s name the competition is much more approachable.  Thus, we published the McCuistion TV post “The Causes of Addiction” with a title tag that read “The Causes of Addiction – Christopher Lawson Kennedy”.  The result is that this post ranks in the top 4 hits in Google for both Lawford’s name as well as his name combined with the keyword “addiction”.

Title tags are very important as they are a blogger and/or webmaster’s interface to search engines.

One of the most common marketing requests we get at Orangecast are franchisees who are looking for ways to market online.  One of the most common goals is to market products and services locally.  However, franchisors generally setup their web presence nationally and struggle with local search engine optimization.  This leaves franchisees in a bind and usually forces them to consider options such as creating local websites, email campaigns, and engaging in social media.  Unfortunately, many franchisors feel threatened by this and often severely limit these avenues per fine print in franchise agreements.  We have heard stories of franchisors sending “cease and desist” for blogs and local websites and forcing franchisees to turn over all customer email addresses of local customers.  The following is a quick list of items to negotiate into your franchisee agreement to ensure you have the flexibility needed maximize online marketing opportunities.

Tip 1 – Investigate Local Search Performance For Existing Franchises

Most regional and national franchisors want to maintain brand control and have a single website for the brand.  There is generally specific verbiage to prevent the franchisee from creating websites associated with the brand.  As a potential franchisee, you should evaluate the search engine presence for the brand.  This list should include:

• Ask to see analytics reporting for traffic in a particular city.  Get specific as to what keywords drive traffic.  If you are getting into a fast casual dining concept and are being sold on catering being a potential revenue stream, verify that the corporate website is driving local search results related to catering.
• Think like a customer and “Google” local terms to see where the concept surfaces in search.  If you are considering buying a franchise in a handyman services company, Google specific services with local city names and see where their site surfaces in Google.
• Ask if they provide Pay Per Click or Search Engine Marketing campaigns for franchisees.  If so, require that any fees associated with it are on a “cost per conversion” basis versus cost per click.

If you receive significant push back in your search for insight into these items, this should throw up a major red flag.  If you are made promises that this is being worked on, consider delaying your signing or specifically gear payments around progress in this area.  Search Engines are a significant piece of “affordable” marketing for local goods and services.  If this marketing is not available to your franchise, you are starting at a significant disadvantage.

Tip 2 – Review Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is a powerful mechanism for connecting with customers.  Review campaigns provided by the franchisor.  Review content, open rates, and click through rates.  A good campaign will have open rates of 25% or better and will have a 15% click through rate or better.  If the content is too promotional and/or open and click through rates are not good, contractually give yourself the option to execute email marketing locally.  You should be able to drill into these numbers at a local level and content should be local or regionalized.  If it isn’t, opt to run these yourself as you will produce better results for your units.

Tip 3 – Maintain Social Media Rights for Your Personal Brand

Franchisors are very sensitive in the area of social media.  This is understandable as brand impersonation is a huge issue in social media.  Still, you are your own personality and being a franchisee is part of that.  Maintain the right to be “Bob Smith, Dallas Franchisee of XYZ” in your social media profile.  This includes broader initiatives like a Facebook fan page.  Social Media is becoming a very powerful and you should leave your options open in this space respecting the brand management needs of the franchisor.

Summary

There are hundreds of variables to consider when structuring a franchise deal.  Though the above might seem small in the scheme of things, the long term success of a local franchise relies on marketing.  As a franchisee, you can’t completely rely on the franchisor to make your business work and you will want to maintain some control.  If you are being forced into giving up search engine, email marketing, and social media control, consider another franchise opportunity or revisit the concept after they can prove results in these areas.

WordPress is the premium blogging platform. One of the things I appreciate the most about WordPress is that it has significantly evolved; yet, stuck to its roots. You might ask, “What does that mean?”. The team at Automattic has really evolved the WordPress platform by providing great enhancements to the core infrastructure, user interface, security, and extensibility making every new release a must have for bloggers. Still, the core tenants of the platform have remained consistent which reduce upgrade headaches. You would never see a .DOCX fiasco with WordPress where a single upgrade breaks everything and creates huge incompatibilities. Sure, die hard WordPress bloggers have had their moments in the evolution of the product but nothing has compared with what commercial software companies have pulled off in the past.  Though I love the consistency of WordPress, there are a set of “Defaults” that have been with the platform since day 1 that do present challenges to blogs.  The biggest impact is in the area of search engine optimization. For example, the default installation of WordPress doesn’t use permalinks rendering the URLs of all new installs as http://www.myblog.com/?p=1 . There are simple settings within WordPress to improve upon this.

The following are 5 Default Settings that most WordPress blogs suffer from with regard to SEO.  If you change these settings, your WordPress blog will be more compatible with search engines and will likely increase traffic from readers who are not aware of your blog.

Tweak #1 – Enable Permalinks

URL structures are important to search engines for two reasons. The first is for purposes of inbound links. If you write a blog post called, “My Greatest Discoveries” and a newspaper or other powerful site links to it, you want that link to be permanent so that changes in your blog will not break the link. If changes in your blog end up breaking the link, you will loose the search engine juice from the link. The second is that search engines can decipher meaning from words in URLs. If you have no words, you loose the opportunity to get a little extra boost. In today’s competitive SEO environment, you need everything you can get.

Here is how to change your default URL settings in WordPress to enable “permalinks”.

• Login to the WordPress administrative panel with administrator privileges.
• If you have logged in with administrator privileges, you will see the following when you click on Settings:

WordPress Settings

• Click on the Permalinks link
• You can then change this from the default of “p?=123″ to one of the presets or create a custom setting. The most common custom setting is %postname%.

Permalink Settings

• Save your changes and the changes will take effect. If this causes an issue with your blog, you can always reset to the default; however, WordPress uses a server level redirect on this so even links to your old URL conventions will find their way to the new name and the search engines will respect this type of redirect.

Tweak #2 – Canonicalization

The first time I heard this word I said, “What the heck is this?”.  It is almost like you need a “bouncing ball” like they have in children’s learning programs to even pronounce that word! Still, this is the official word used by Google for this topic as explained by Matt Cutts himself in his blog on the topic of SEO Advice.  So, I’m going to use the word but I will explain it is simplistic terms

Let’s start with a hypothetical website called MYSITE.COM.  Basically, http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com are theoretically considered two different sites in most search engines. Most cool sites these days leave off the WWW. WordPress by default leaves off the WWW. The problem is that most websites have the WWW (guess we are uncool). So what happens when you have a blog installed at http://www.mysite.com/blog, WordPress will actually change the URL to http://mysite.com/blog when you get to the blog part of the site. Bam, you loose all of the Page Rank and consistency from your site. If you are an SEO, you will probably want to start a debate on this. Don’t as at the end of the day we’ll both agree that consistency URLs is the best approach when dealing with search engines. And, this is a single setting change in WordPress that won’t hurt anything. Here is how you do it:

1. Go back to the settings in your admin console.
2. Go to the General menu item.
3. Change the WordPress address (URL) from the non WWW URL to the WWW URL (e.g. http://mysite.com/blog to http://www.mysite.com/blog .)
4. When you save the changes, WordPress will kick you out of the administrator console as everything has changed. Don’t worry, just login again and the change will have been made.

Canonicalization Control

Tweak #3 – Title and Description Tags

Two of the most important content factors for a search engine are Title and Description tags.  Basically, there are three pieces of content that any search engine will see on a given page.  The first is the page itself which is what you and I as human beings see.  WordPress does a great job of putting page content out there in clean text for any bot (Search Engine robot) to consume.  The next is a Title tag.  Title tags can be seen by humans by looking up in the top of your browser bar as most browsers put this up there.  Don’t ask me why but they just do.  A title tag is generally an 80 character tag that you can use to label a page.  Search Engines put a lot of weight on this tag!!! It is a must have.  The third piece of content is a description tag.  Humans can’t see this unless you go into a source code view of the actual web pages.  Bots can, however.  A Description tag is a 160 to 255 character tag that describes the page.

WordPress, by default, bases the title tag of any given webpage on the name of the blog and the name of the page or post.  In some cases this can work out for a blogger but in most cases you leave a lot of search engine influence on the table.  WordPress does not put forward a meaningful description tag by default.  To change this behavior, bloggers must install one of two recommended plugins into their WordPress installation.  The two plugins to choose from are All In One SEO or Platinum SEO Pack.  There are others but these are two I recommend.  The installation and activation of these plugins will allow a blogger to generically control Title and Description tag characteristics across your entire blog as well as have granular control at the page and post level.  Here is how you can start to tinker with these types of plugins.

First, go to the settings of the plugin and put a Title and Description tag for your HOME page.  Unless your blog is known by it’s title, pull that out of the title tag as you can put those characters to better use.  Then, as you go about writing posts, create titles and descriptions that have some search volume.  You want things that are searched.  My first post in this social media blog made the claim that social media was more powerful than TV Marti.  Why did I do that?  Social Media has too much search competition but a 20 year old, controversial government radio station called TV Marti gets some search volume but has 1/10th of the competition.  That was one strategy. . .what’s yours?

In the end play with this.  If you go to the VIEW menu of your browser and choose VIEW SOURCE you can actually use the FIND function to look for the Title and Description tags of this post.  Look at them and see if you can find the keywords I am going after!  In the end, keep it to good copy and don’t try to put a bunch of keywords stuffed into an attempt to SPAM search engines.

* If your theme or installation of WordPress is older or doesn’t implement the right functions, the installation of one of these plugins can cause a “white out”.  This is where you can’t access your WordPress installation.  If this happens, don’t stress.  If you simply login to your FTP site and manually delete the plugin, all will go back to normal.  You should have the contact info of a friend or professional who is comfortable with FTP to do this for you.  You should also have your login information handy as to minimize your downtime.  In most cases this won’t happen but it does from time to time.  You will want to consider upgrading your WordPress installation or changing/fixing your theme to resolve this.  Consult with a professional for this type of work as you can mess things up trying to do this if you don’t know what you are doing.

Tweak #4 – Give A Bot A Map

Most search engine robots will open an XML based sitemap to get an idea of what a site looks like.  Though really intended for very large sites (10,000 pages or more), they can be of value for smaller websites.   Per an SEOmoz article entitle “Four Visual Charts on SEO Tactics“, Microsoft’s Bing search engine does provide SEO benefit to smaller sites who provide a sitemap.  On most websites we have to create these manually or use software to create and update them manually.  In WordPress however, sitemaps are an easy and self maintaining function to with the installation of a single plugin–Google XML Sitemaps.   The bottom line is that sitemaps are a good practice and if you follow these steps it only takes a minute to have WordPress create a sitemap and automatically update it every time you update your site with a new page or post.

* Sitemaps are not a default setting so this recommendation does break from the theme of this post but it is so easy to implement that it made the Top 5 list.

Tweak #5 – H1 Tags (Advanced)

The HTML language provides a specification for how various elements of a page are tagged.  One section of these specifications for HEADING tags.   One very important HEADING tag for search engines is the HEADING 1 tag or the H1 tag.  Default WordPress installations create two challenges for search engines in this area.  The first is that most themes declare the title of a page or post as an H2 tag.  The second is that they generally use the title of the post as the H2 tag.  The first problem to solve for is that we want that H2 to be an H1.  This is one easy change in the template of your theme.  The more challenging issue for serious writers is that you might want your post title to be an “eye catching headlines” but need your H1 tag to be a little more geared toward search engines.  As a matter of fact, a typical technique that I use for writing blog posts is to target search engines with Title tag (See title and description tags in Tweak #4) and H1 tag but I use my blog title to engage with my human readers.  This post is a great example.  The title tag and H1 tag uses highly searched terms like “Top 5″ and “SEO” and the post title engages with my readers via a CopyBlogger technique of “Does Your Blog Suffer from 5 WordPress Default Settings?”.  Here’s the problem, you or someone you know is going to have to get into the PHP of your WordPress theme to make these changes.  Instead of providing step by step instructions on this one, I’m going to refer you to Get WordPressed for a step by step walk through with graphics called “H1 Hack for WordPress Pages”

Summary

WordPress is great.  It makes publishing search engine friendly content on the web a breeze.  In sticking to its roots WordPress does, however, implement a few default settings that place a huge roadblock between bloggers and search engines.  If you follow the steps above and take the time to understand writing Title and Description tags, your blog can quickly move out of the penalty box of WordPress default installs to one that can introduce you and your content to thousands of new users.  If you have other recommendations to add to this post or want to debate some of my observations above, by all means submit a comment as I’d love to hear from you.