Title Tags in 2013
-
For blog posts do you think it is better to use something like "Atlanta Plumbing Company" or "Choosing an Atlanta Plumbing Company" (article title). I have been using the article titles but I think it might be hindering rankings a bit. I use to use the keyword but it seems a bit spammy now.
I want to create titles for the readers but rank well too.
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
-
Jason,
Think of how many individual blog posts you're going to need to write in 2013, 2014, and beyond (one hundred, two hundred, more?) and how much social outreach you'll have to accomplish over that time in order to build the blog into a really effective marketing tool for your company. Then you gotta wonder how you can maintain interest and focus writing all those posts on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company". On top of that, gotta wonder how many of those social profiles you reach out to week after week after week who are going to want to share your content on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company". And then you gotta wonder about the readers and how their interest will be maintained while you're writing only on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company".
I'd say that you're on the right path in thinking that your titles seem a bit spammy, but you've gotta get off the path and get on the highway. On the highway, your blog can reach its greater potential--a vehicle that can reach and engage a community that is hungry for a wide variety of topics within your theme.
As someone here at SEOmoz is fond of saying, content needs to be exceptional, inspirational, unique, credible, fun, and beneficial to share in order to accomplish it's goal of being an effective marketing tool. I would start with that, when contemplating your titles, and then write your posts accordingly.
-
It's really important that users find what they are looking for in that the title should be as descriptive as possible otherwise they will just bounce off the page. That said, I would try to ensure that you word your titles well for SEO by keeping irrelevant stop words to a minimum and keep your primary target keywords or phrase early in the page title
-
Hey Jason, I am glad that someone really asked this question!
Well everybody wants people to read whatever they are writing on their blog and for that one of the ways is to rank the blog well in search engines from the searchable keywords like you have mentioned in your question.
Actually the keywords that you are trying to focus is one of the money making keywords within your niche and that is why it’s more competitive than other keywords that you are not focusing. I think the better idea is create natural titles that may or may not focus keywords all the time but focus on the content on the page...and give indication to Google and users about what the page is all about...
As far as targeting keywords is concern try to focus on long tail keywords with less competition so that you blog will easily rank and get some attention and if it will really worth reading you will see people share far and wide naturally through social networks, emails and all other possible mediums.
Hope this helps!
-
Have you glanced at SEOMoz's best practices for title tags? - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
In my opinion you should have the title as natural as possible and that should be the a clear label as to what your article is about. Have you looked at examples such as how SEOMoz has titles on their blog - article title | brand
In my experience you will also pick up more long tail traffic with more natural titles such as using the full title rather than just a specific keyword. It also looks less spammy and over-optimized which is something to take into consideration after recent Google updates.
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
-
Weird Blog tags and re-directs
Hello fellow Digital Marketeers! As an in-house kinda guy, I rarely get to audit sites other than my own. But, I was tasked with auditing another. So I ran it through Screaming Frog and the usual tools. I got a couple of URLs come back with timeout messages, so I checked them manually- they're apparently part of a blog's archive: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/tag/training-2/ I click 'read more' and it takes you to: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/pfi-contracts-3-myth-busters-to-help-achieve-savings/ The first URL seems entirely redundant. Has anyone else seen something like this? Just an explanation as to why something like that would exist, and how you'd handle that would be grand! Much appreciated, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Wordpress: Tags generate duplicate Content - just delete the tags!?
Asking people, they say tags are bad and spamy and as I can see they generate all my duplicate page content issues. So the big question is, why Google very often prefers to show in SERPS these Tag-URLS... so it can't be too bad! :)))? Then after some research I found the "Term Optimizer" on Yoast.com ... that should help exactly with this problem but it seems not to be available anymore? So may be there another plugin that can help... or just delete all tags from my blog? and install permanent redirects?
Technical SEO | | inlinear
Is this the solution?0 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Use of Multiple Tags
Hi, I have been monitoring some of the authority sites and I noticed something with one of them. This high authority site suddenly started using multiple tags for each post. And I mean, loads of tags, not just three of four. I see that each post comes with at least 10-20 tags. And these tags don't always make sense either. Let's say there is a video for "Bourne Legacy", they list tags like bourne, bourney legacy, bourne series, bourne videos, videos, crime movies, movies, crime etc. They don't even seem to care about duplicate content issues. Let's say the movie is named The Dragon, they would inclue dragon and the-dragon in tags list and despite those two category pages(/dragon and /the-dragon) being exactly the same now, they still wouldn't mind listing both the tags underneath the article. And no they don't use canonical tag. (there isn't even a canonical meta on any page of that site) So I am curious. Do they just know they have a very high DA, they don't need to worry about duplicate content issues? or; I am missing something here? Maybe the extra tags are doing more good than harm?
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Google is keeping very old title tags in the SERPs for my site. How can I fix this?
Hi Around 6 months ago a site I work with changed its brand. One company became two. Despite changing the title when a new site went live around 6 months ago Google still picks up the old title for certain search results relevant to the old title. When a search result is relevant to the new title it shows that. It's very frustrating as we are trying to re-brand and do not want the old brand name showing for some very important search results. Thanks in advance for your help Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman0 -
Duplicate Page Title with Pretashop
We have our main website and blog in Wordpress under www.enasport.com and our shop with Prestashop under www.enasport.com/productos so all our products have for example www.enasport.com/productos/56-creatina-monohidrato.html I wonder if this is the problem with Duplicate Page Title as seems we have more than 200 of this issue. Is there any way to solve this?
Technical SEO | | ENASports0 -
Page Titles where URL customization is limited
Hi all, I'm working for a new company which has several websites built on the Miva Merchant 5.5 platform. I'm new to SEO and trying to improve one specific category of products. With Miva the URL structure is set to: "category/" or "product/". I would have liked to have the ability to create URLs like "bike/beach-cruisers/mens-red-hawaiian.html". Since I cannot do that I'm trying to determine the best product name and page titles. Currently all of our titles have the word "bike". So when a category page is displayed, which shows over 100 products I get flagged in my campaign for over using the keyword "bike". However, if I take the work "bike" out of the page title I'm concerned that it would hurt us in the SERPs. Another factor that I'm getting flagged for on my campaign is the fact that our navigation uses the same key words repeatedly in each link. I'm not sure if it's really hurting us or not. Below is an example. I'm looking for some input on recommendations for product names and page titles. Below are some examples of what I'm working with. Any input or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Menu Sample: Bikes-Street-Blue-Mens Bikes-Street-Blue-Womens Bikes-Street-Blue-Kids Bikes-Street-Orange-Mens Bikes-Street-Orange-Womens Bikes-Street-Orange-Kids Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Blue-Mens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Blue-Womens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Blue-Kids Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Orange-Mens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Orange-Womens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Orange-Kids Current Page Titles/Name: Mens Bike Street Blue | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/mens-bike-street-blue.html Mens Bike Street Orange | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/mens-bike-street-orange.html Womens Bike Street Blue | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/womens-bike-street-blue.html Womens Bike Street Orange | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/womens-bike-street-orange.html
Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact0