'Title tags' are an important part of a successful bid to create a strong online presence.

Title tags let you give the search engines, as well as users, actionable, vital information about your web pages.

The following guidelines will ensure that you are using title tags properly:

' Lead with Relevant Keywords: The first words in your title tag should be the primary keyword or phrase that you want that particular page to rank for. If you are using a secondary keyword, separate it from your primary by using a vertical line, followed by another vertical line to divide the human text, which is essentially the message you want to convey to users. A sample title tag might look like this:

'Web Development | Website Design | How to choose the right website development firm'

In this example, the company wishes to rank for 'web development,' and on this specific page, 'website design.' The 'human text' lets readers know about the information contained on that specific page.

' Use Compelling Human Text: The human text that is inserted after the keywords will give those keywords context, helping users narrow down their choices before clicking through to your website. Quality human text will help cut your bounce rate.

' Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Cramming your title tags full of catchy keywords only confuses users and makes search engines throw up the red flags.

' Make Your Title Tags Unique: Each page of your website is different, so you should have different title tags to help with navigation.

' Remember Your Alt Tags: If you're running an ecommerce site, you will likely have lots of images of your merchandise. Always assign a descriptive alt tag to items for maximum results.

Copyright 2011 dzine it, Inc. Interent Marketing New York All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Recent news regarding JCPenney, Overstock.com and BeatThatQuote.com is evidence that Google is trying to maintain a level playing field, but it has opened the door to a potential SEO problem.

With Google's new policy, it seems that the easiest way to beat your competitors is to write about them on an irrelevant website and wait for Google to punish them. If your business website is ranked third for a particular keyword or term, and your competitors can be displaced by a nasty online report, it would seem that you wouldn't need to do much work to beat them if you can get them banned.

The new policy opens the door to the possibility that your competition can buy dirty links and report them on webmaster forums.

I'm certainly not recommending this. If a business can't beat someone legitimately, then that business does not deserve to be ranked higher in the first place.

However, there is a very real possibility of a reverse SEO attack, which begs the question, how can you protect yourself from such an attack?

There are two things that a small business website owner can do.

1. Set up Google alerts to monitor your brand. If you add your website address in a Google alert, allowing you to get a notification as soon as your brand is mentioned online. This way, if a competitor attempts to mess with you online, you will see it immediately and be able to offer some sort of rebuttal or asked to have the mention manually removed.

2. Set up a link monitoring service account. Link monitoring services like Majestic SEO can give you a daily break down on new links discovered and you can use their graphing systems to see link spikes. If you see an unusual link spike, you may want to implement a strategy to offset any potential bad links.

These are two simple steps that you can take action on today to protect your brand in the future.

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