62 replies to this topic

[vanzist]

Hi Friends,

I am back after a long time..but I have one question for you guys....It's about the Page title.

Michel Gray has a post in search engine land about optimizing page titles...http://searchengineland.com/optimize-titles-singular-plural-17103

There he mentioned about keeping the title short and use phrases...so as to utilize singular and plural keywords...and use phrases to make it less spammy...

I have a question for you. Let’s take an example from Travel Industry or Casino Industry. As you know..this industry is so competitive and there are so many keywords to target. For a Home Page, If I am putting a title like

Cheap Airfare, Hotels, Car Rental, Vacations, Cruises - Brand Name - or

Online Casino, Play Casino, No deposit Casino, Brand Name

will that work…

The base of the question was if we add 3-4 keywords keeping the character limit within 70 - will the title still look spammy…..


please advise..

[Jill]

Sorry, but there's really no right or wrong way for Titles. Try different things and see what works best for each of your pages.

[qwerty]

When you're writing titles, you have to remember that while the keywords you choose, how many of them you use and what order you put them in are likely to have an effect on rankings, your real audience is the searcher, not the search engine. Getting to the top of the SERP does you no good if the title doesn't get people to click on it, so try to think of it as the headline for a classified advertisement: it has to have the right words so people know what it's about, but it also ought to be attractive. On the other hand, you're not very attractive if nobody sees you.

That's true for on-page content too, but because the title tag is so much shorter, you've got a much more delicate balance to deal with.

[Michael Martinez]

If you want to play the title option in a competitive query you're better off matching a page title to the query rather than trying to stuff multiple expressions into it. Asking a search engine to rank your home page for a lot of different queries is asking a lot. It happens, of course, but not always.

If you want to target 10 queries with one site and you're not skilled enough to target them all with one page, then use 10 pages to get the job done. Each page should have unique content relevant to the query it is targeting. You want to build relevant links to the pages.

[vanzist]

thanks everyone for uour guide and help...

I tried the title pattern in one of my travelproduct and it really worked....I am glad that you helped me.

van

[Jill]

Asking a search engine to rank your home page for a lot of different queries is asking a lot. It happens, of course, but not always.

I couldn't disagree more with this statement. Home pages, more than any other page of a website typically see traffic from a wide variety of keyword phrases. I can't say that I've ever seen a home page only show up for one keyword phrase.

Use that to your advantage and optimize it for at least 3-5 phrases of your choice, if not more.

[Michael Martinez]

I couldn't disagree more with this statement. Home pages, more than any other page of a website typically see traffic from a wide variety of keyword phrases. I can't say that I've ever seen a home page only show up for one keyword phrase.

I can't say that either, though clearly that seems to be the point I was making (definitely not what I intended).

I just mean that novices in the art of SEO should not take on too many keywords for a single page.

Trying to rank for 3 unrelated expressions in a page title is not the best way to learn about search engine optimization.

[vipinsham]

hi there,

what exaclty I think is that the home page shows result for more keywords than any other internal page is due to the reasons like:

Home page priority always tends to 1.
Home page is the main source to all other pages, I mean the home have all the details, all the keywords directly or indirectly. Home page is only the first impression any user comes and the home page contains content for every services which are really your keywords.
And initially any link submitter used to do the offpage for the homepage for many keywords.

But if we target internal pages with many keywrds than probably that page really shows very slow result as shown by the home page.

There are still other reason for the this concept. But I finds these reason to stick better.

[ClickClick]

I find the home page is the most likely page to get listed for a keyword if you have it in the title - but this may well be something to do with the fact that the home page of my website has the highest number of links. I have 4 of my most popular keywords in my home page title and am now listed top-4 for all of them (it takes a lot of time btw - I changed the title about 6 months ago and it's been a slow process for the new keywords that were added). THere are also specific pages on these keywords and unfortunately, because the home page holds more importance it's always the home page that's listed - that's the down-side! If somebody is looking for 'golf clubs' and they see a page that says 'information on golf clubs' they are much more likely to click into that than say, 'golf buggies, golf clubs, golf gloves, Chiswick Golf Range'. The only problem is it's much more difficult to get lesser pages listed for main keywords.

[webmanager]

Put the top keyword / keyword combination at the beginning of the title. As you say keep the character limit. Less than 70 characters is also OK. That's my experience, everything else is speculation in my opinion.

[BBCoach]

As you say keep the character limit. Less than 70 characters is also OK. That's my experience, everything else is speculation in my opinion.

Unequivocally not true. It doesn't matter to SEs how many characters you use in the title. I have thousands of product page titles (titles of products) with way more than 70 characters and thousands with no more than 15 characters.

The only basis for the 70 character limit argument is when the SERP is displayed. Some prefer not to have the ellipsis, while others (like me) have seen no difference in click-thrus as a result of the ellipsis. The rule of thumb is if it requires more than 70 characters to describe the titles of your pages, then do it. If it doesn't, then don't add more words than is necessary.

[JohnLA]

Unequivocally not true. It doesn't matter to SEs how many characters you use in the title. I have thousands of product page titles (titles of products) with way more than 70 characters and thousands with no more than 15 characters.

The only basis for the 70 character limit argument is when the SERP is displayed. Some prefer not to have the ellipsis, while others (like me) have seen no difference in click-thrus as a result of the ellipsis. The rule of thumb is if it requires more than 70 characters to describe the titles of your pages, then do it. If it doesn't, then don't add more words than is necessary.

The more high-targeted words in the title can boost your search engine rankings. There is no limit in the title of a page to have.

This is also true in the articles that your site contains and the articles that are submitted to article directories.

[adibranch]

Generic terms only on the homepage for me.. and two or three at most. The homepage is like any other page ie a page for term targeting. You wouldnt create any other page to target seven or eight terms, so why do it for the homepage. Not only that, but targeting terms on your homepage which are also targeted elsewhere on the site is bad for your serps, as the SE's will always favour your homepage.

The homepage of a site which sells cast iron garden items, such as garden benches and a whole heap of other stuff obviously needs to target 'cast iron garden' as a generic term. Garden benches are a big seller, so we add garden benches into the mix, hoping to catch a few searches for this onto our homepage. We also have a dedicated garden benches page, which obviously is the preferred landing page, and the one we want returning in the serps. But, just to be on the safe side, we add it to the homepage... after all, the homepage has the most prominence of all or pages.

The result is this...

The Home page gets returned INSTEAD of the landing page, and at a lower position. Your actual landing page gets ignored. This is a bad result.

Now, we know the homepage carries more links than our landing pages, but lets assume the landing pages have a good quality of links and also carries enough weight to be listed on its own.
The home page (seen obviously as the most important page on your site by search egines) carries terms which are also targeted on your main 'cast iron garden benches' page. Google checks its index, see's two pages geared for 'cast iron garden benches'. It chooses what is obviously the most important of the two, not because of matching percentages, but because of what it deems the most important or linked page. It makes no difference that the garden benches landing page has better targeting, content, and more relevant matches than the homepage (and a good listing in the index by its own right), it simply sees the terms in the hompage, and returns that instead.
This is bad, but it happens, i've seen it. I've even seen google return a homepage when it carried ONE MENTION in the copy, as opposed to a dedicated landing page about that term which also carried good weight. Google will always return your homepage as opposed to your landing page when terms are carried across the two pages.

Now, why would i want this? why would i want my homepage returned when it should be my landing page?
Add terms into the homepage, and lose your serp positions for your dedicated pages, its that simple. If you gear your homepage for several terms, make them generic. Dont target terms which you're targeting on other pages..


What i normally do, is initially catch all terms on the homepage, and once the site gets more established and more pages get weight, i remove these terms, and let the other pages do the work. In my opinion, the homepage should only carry two or three generic terms.

Edited by adibranch, 21 May 2009 - 04:24 AM.

[mal4mac]

The rule of thumb is if it requires more than 70 characters to describe the titles of your pages, then do it. If it doesn't, then don't add more words than is necessary.

I disagree. You might write a general page on "casinos" that you hope will score for "online casinos" . You think the heading "Casinos" is all that is necessary. But surely you should think again and shoot for that keyword. Maybe:

"Casinos - Online Casinos and Real Casinos"
"Online Casinos and Real Casinos"
"Casinos - Online and Real"
"Investigating online and real casinos"
"Casinos"

Just for fun, and just using your gut feeling, which of the headings would score highest for "online casinos"? Answer now without looking at other answers... My gut feeling is below the fold:
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
Gut feeling: all would be equally likely to do well, except for "casinos". Keywords must be in the heading at least once, but they could be anywhere.

[adibranch]

I disagree. You might write a general page on "casinos" that you hope will score for "online casinos" .

You think the heading "Casinos" is all that is necessary. But surely you should think again and shoot for that keyword. Maybe:

"Casinos - Online Casinos and Real Casinos"
"Online Casinos and Real Casinos"
"Casinos - Online and Real"
"Investigating online and real casinos"

blimey no.. as a lone term 'casinos' wont be found for 'online casinos' under any circumstances unless you're mentioning online specifically. You wouldnt normally include those other terms either unless your page was also about them (although ideally of course you'd use a seperate page for them). Trying to grab 'investigating online casino's' terms when your page is about casinos in canada (for example) isnt going to work.