Optimized page titles post penguin
-
Just a quick question to hear a few opinions on page titles in a post penguin/panda world.
For example, we are working on a large downloads portal that offers Addons for games called FSX and FS2004... Page titles are currently as follows:
Concorde for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
Quants Airbus A380 for FSX - Civil Aircraft DownloadsI thought it would be beneficial to remove the boilerplate "Civil Aircraft Downloads" to stop the template effect in the titles. Yay or nay? Good idea or bad idea? Other ideas?
Also, after removing that the titles would be as follows:
British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX
We still will have "for FSX" boiler plate text...is this okay? Perhaps we should remove the "for" and just have the title as "FSX Concorde" or "Concorde FSX" -what do you guys think?
Are there any other title suggestions you guys can recommend?
Your thoughts, tips and suggestions are very much appreciated.
-
Peter,
Are you saying that every product is an FSX Addon?
If so, then you are going to need to think this through and really get clear on Keyword research. Other keywords that get a ton of queries are FSX as a stand alone, FSX Simulator, etc. Also, FSX Download might be a clever one for those where there is a direct download as many who buy software do not wish to wait.
So, my thought is this: You could make it start with the FSX piece: FSX Download, FSX Missions, FSX Aircraft, FSX Addon PIPE the specific aircraft PIPE then your Brand Name.
So: FSX AddOn | Boeing 747 British Airways | Your Brand
I think this will help you and as long as your content is unique (so dont have 90% of FSX Addon on the page and 10% on the plane). There are ways to avoid duplicating the content by potentially using Categories then make the product the individual aircraft download. I would need to see more of the site and think it through to be clear on resolution.
Hope this bit helps, -
Lets say you wanted to rank for "blue cat" having your page set up like this:
URL: http://www.brand.com/blue-cat
Page Title:blue cat
H1:blue cat
body: blue cat
link on page: blue cat
This is considered over optimizing
Having your page set up like this:
URL: http://www.brand.com/blue-cat
Page Title:blue cat from the Brand
H1:Welcome to blue cat - where we painted our cat blue.
body: the blue cat has many friends and smells like paint. lorem ipsum etc. etc.
link on page: learn more about the blue cat
This is a page that uses diversity and still includes your main keyword phrase. This is how you protect your site prom the over optimizing.
-
This overall was a great question and removes a bit of anxiety I'd been having. However, Donnie I have a followup - can you please elaborate on not using the exact keyword? Do you mean like "cat" in the url, "cats" in the title, "felines" in the H1... ?
-
Thank you for your replies guys.
So from your comments, I'm under the impression that it's OK to use boilerplate text that is not the company/brand name in titles. I mean, if I was to use "FSX Addon Boeing 747" then we would have over 20,000 pages with "FSX Addon" at the start of the title tag...that's okay?
From research and reading, I was under the impression to steer away from templating in a post panda/penguin world...not just in page content but titles too.
Ler me know your thoughts!
-
I like to think from a users perspective. When you type something into Google many times you will click on the title that shows exactly or close to the exact thing you were looking for.
SEOmoz report card recommends that you place your keyword as close to the beginning of the title. However do not use exact keyword in your URL/title/H1/Body, use diversity.
-
SEO-wise: have your keyword in the first position in the title
Aside from that you want to encourage a high CTR with a title that describes the page and entices a click. If you have room for a brand name boiler plate, I like to add it. I only remove it if the title is too long and would get cut off in SERPs.
-
The first thing you should be looking at is what is the query? In other words what are the searched on Keywords for these items. Since FSX is an add on for flight simulation, what do people who are looking for it search for?
If they search for FSX addons and the type (Boeing 747) and your company is Super FSX Addons, I would follow the suggested convention of FSX Add on Boeing 747 | Super FSX Addons.
So, the keyword is first in the title tag, separated by a PIPE (straight up line) and then the Brand.
Be sure you take a look though and know what the important keywords are and don't just assume you know because you sell this all the time. You may be surprised,
Good luck.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What to do about endless size pages
I'm working on a site that sells products that come in many different sizes. One product may come in 30 sizes.The products themselves are identical, except for the size. There are collections pages that are all of several kinds of product in a particular size and then there are individual product pages of one product the specific size. Collections pages for widgets size 30 is the same content as widgets size 29. A single product page for gold-widget-size-30 is the same content as the single product page gold-widget-size-29. To make matters worse, they all have the same tags and very little written content. The site is in Shopify. Last month there were almost 400 pages that produced visits on organic, mostly in the 1 to 4 per month range, but all together about 1000 visits. There are several hundred more that produced no traffic in organic, but are duplicate (except for size) and part of this giant ball of tangled string. What do you think I should do? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Branding and Page Titles - Please Help
Hello, I have a question about page titles. How important is branding here? I'm not referring to the company name, but rather the terminology that's used as "branding language" for a company. For example, let's say that the it would be a good idea to target the keyword "Restaurant Coupons" based on search volume and competition. However, our branding adheres to the language "Dining Offers". Is it considered a bad idea to use "Restaurant Coupons" in the page title? Or is that considered inconsistent branding? Basically, I'm just trying to figure out the correct balance between the SEO value of words and adhering to a company's branding. Any help is appreciated! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atmosol
Nick1 -
Pages Titles in SERPs - Wordpress Site
In Google SERPs we have several websites (built in wordpress) who's pages are being displayed without using the page title - is this google ignoring the page title or is there a problem in our code - also if this is google is it still taking notice of the page title to determine what content is on the page?I have read several articles on this but wondered if someone can advise - I can provide the URL if required.Also I wanted to 100% that our robots.txt is behaving its self.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
What would you consider an over optimized title tag? [examples included]
Say you want to target a single page for 2 terms and they both get a good amount of search volume. At the same time you don't want the title tag to be atrocious, do you just choose one? (maybe the one with most search volume). I'm going to make up some examples which aren't based on real search volume for the sake of time and completely fake and you be the judge: custom car parts - exact sv: 4000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule
personalized car parts - exact sv: 5000
wholesale custom car parts - exact sv: 4400 Title tag A: Custom Car Parts - Personalized Wholesale Car Parts | Company Name OR Title Tag B: Custom Car Parts | Company Name Or You recommend. Do you get where i am going here? Some of the pages on my website target 3-4 terms that mean exactly or pretty close to the same thing.0 -
Help, really struggling with fixing mistakes post-Penguin
We had previously implemented a strategy of paying for lots of links and focusing on 3 or 4 keywords as our anchors, which used to REALLY work (I know, I know, bad black hat strategy - I have since learned my lesson). These keywords and others have since plummeted up to 100 spots since Panda 3.3 and Penguin. So I'm trying to go in and fix all our mistakes cuz our domain is too valuable to us just to start over from scratch. Yesterday I literally printed a 75 page document of all of our links according to Open Site Explorer. I have been going in and manually changing anchor text wherever I can, and taking down the very egregious links if possible.This has involved calling and emailing webmasters, digging up old accounts and passwords, and otherwise just trying to diversify our anchor text and remove bad links. I've also gone into our site and edited some internal links (also too weighty on certain keywords) and removed other links entirely. My rankings have gone DOWN more today. A lot. WTF does Google want? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should we be deleted links from all private networks entirely or just trying to vary the anchor text? Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Are links to on-page content crawled / have any effect on page rank?
Lets say I have a really long article that begins with links to <a name="something">anchors on the same page.</a> <a name="something"></a> <a name="something">E.g.,</a> Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, allowing the user to scroll down to different content. There are also other links on this page that link to other pages. A few questions: Googlebot arrives on the page. Does it crawl links that point to anchors on the same page? When link juice is divided among all the links on the page, do these links count and page rank is then lost? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90 -
Page Titles SEO Title
Hi, I run an e-commerce store and within the CMS I define the SEO title, SEO description and SEO keywords for each item. I spoke to a SEO firm who advised me to start every product title with the colour, as this will reduce the duplicate page titles and serve me well in the future. Whats everyones view on this? Does naming something Grey Armani Jeans | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique stand up better against Armani Jeans Grey | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique? Any help or tips on how to format the page titles and descriptions would be great. Thanks Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillBlackburn0