Title Tags, making them much longer Options

[Username]

Hi everyone,

I have waited to post my results because I wanted to give them well over a month to settle. Thats done and here they are.
6 or 7 weeks ago (about the time Yahoo separated from Google I guess) I decided to take a chance on a domain that had always done well but never really excelled in the serps. I lenghtened the title to 13 to 15 words instead of the 7 or 8 that were currently being used. At the same time I used every good keyword I could think of in a well written (for people) sentence (these words are also sprinkled in the body). Don't get me wrong, it isn't spammy at all, just MUCH more aggressive than I usually operate. I followed this up with an h3 tag line in the first sentence of the body using just the name of the product followed by its location. The pages have roughly 300 words I guess, some vary from this I know and I have never counted them exactly. At the end of the body I used another h3 tag with again using the product name and a cutsy keyword rich description of the product.
Results: The pages are smoking in the engines. Google is ranking everything VERY well and the new Yahoo is just in love with the site. #1, 2 or 3 listings more often than not. These results have been steady for nearly a month now and they are still showing great serps. PR for the index is a 4 and internal pages are either 3's or 4's, body text hasn't really changed for over a year. Not stale but they sure aren't updated every month either, there is no need to for the product being sold.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea these pages are not spammy, every result is dead on topic and very accurate for the searched phrase/phrases. The keywords are also very competitive. Some pages are getting top listings for upwards of 7 or 8 phrases (per page). Just thought I would return a favor and give some info instead of always getting.
Have a great week all and thanks.

[Rob]

Hi Username,

Thanks very much for posting those findings - thats really interesting - especially to me who has always chosen to target 12 words maximum length in my title tags - I guess google isn't finding 13>15 words spammy at all.

I'm interested to know if you had any repitition in the title,

e.g. Rob used to live in England and now Rob lives in Toronto (i.e. 2*my keyword Rob (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) )

Thanks again,

Rob (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Username]

I'm interested to know if you had any repitition in the title

Maybe on one or two internal pages but never on the index page. Where it did occur it made perfect sense. I actually spent way too much time trying not to repeat but after looking at it I decided that it didn't look spammy to me and made sense... so I said heck with it and sent it off.

Take care.

[Jill]

Longer Titles totally rock. I've never understood why anyone would use a short Title when they can use a long one! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Jill

[Rob]

ok thats it - im unleashing a long title on the world!

[Username]

I'm right behind you there dude. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[DennisG]

Interesting information, thanks for sharing Username (interesting name too (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ). I guess I have some work to do today to see which pages could use a longer filename... :learn:

[lisa]

Longer Titles totally rock. I've never understood why anyone would use a short Title when they can use a long one!

While I generally agree, doesn't having less words in your title improve the keyword density and the overall importance of those keywords?

On a secondary note, I also like shorter titles sometimes because they look neater. (Titles longer than about 65 characters get cut off in Google and sometimes look spammy.)

Am I wrong in my assumptions? (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wacko.gif)

[Jill]

While I generally agree, doesn't having less words in your title improve the keyword density and the overall importance of those keywords?

Not if all the words in the Title are focused on your keyword phrases for that page.

Titles getting cut off in Google don't look spammy to me. They just look umm...cut off!

You're not wrong Lisa, it's more of a preference thing. My feeling is why optimize for just a few words (i.e., one phrase) when you can optimize for many?

Jill

[Force7]

In the past Google liked shorter title tags and since they dominated the market that was the strategy we used. Now that the playing field is becoming more level we have been increasing some of our tags on the new pages. I had not gone as far as 13 to 15 words but we are going to test it also. The longer tag certainly gives you more opportunities to have more than one keyword phrase.

I decided to take a chance on a domain that had always done well but never really excelled in the serps. I lenghtened the title to 13 to 15 words instead of the 7 or 8 that were currently being used.

UserName I would love to see a sample of your title tag would it be too much to ask to PM me the url? I am wondering how you handled the repetition, keyword phrases.

Thanks!

[lisa]

Titles getting cut off in Google don't look spammy to me. They just look umm...cut off!

Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but let me give an illustration of my reasoning. For the group of hotels that we are working on, there have been ups and downs in terms of traffic and revenue.

In some cases, we've noticed that for the name of the hotel, visits have dropped. The ranking is still #1, but visits have dropped drastically.

My theory was that where before there was *just* the hotel name, now there are many more words in the title, making it similar in appearance to the spammy directory listings below it. So I assumed that this might be the reason for the drop in traffic -- a long page title that lost its branding power.

Any thoughts? Opposing theories? I realize this might just be a seasonal thing, but perhaps there is more to it?

And again -- sorry for hijacking the post!! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/huh.gif)

[Jill]

Well what other words are you using? Maybe they're not the best ones?

Try taking them out again and see if it makes a difference, or try testing different words, or different ways of organizing those words.

Perhaps there's a way you can make it clear that you're the official hotel site? Like instead of it saying "Hyatt Hotel blah blah blah" (or whatever) it could say "Hyatt.com blah blah blah" which would show straight away that it was the official hotel site.

Jill

[qwerty]

I'm with Lisa, for the most part. The title tag has to serve two audiences (just like everything else on a web page): spiders and users. If you make a page title that contributes to pushing the page up in the SERP that's great, but if users aren't inclined to click on it, it's not going to do you any good.

That doesn't necessarily mean that a tag that's long enough to get cut off in the SERP is bad, but it's worth looking into.

[lisa]

Thanks for the suggestions, Jill. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

The keywords are all relevant, but at times the title tags get quite lengthy (some of the hotel names themselves are a mouthful). So we've been experimenting with a couple of different ways to present the title -- we'll see what happens!!

[bkernst]

For years I used to make titles which looked too spammy in the end, it seems to me that it is easier to get rankings and visitors by just simply typing a title that actually is descriptive and self explanatory about what the page is about. For a long time I have been testing that on two of my sites, and every month I always get visitors from search engines where something on the page and/or title was typed in. Most of the time the search query was relevent.
My titles were up to ten words depending on the page, since they also contained the site name (not URL).

Bernhard