Keyword Placement in Page Title - will changing it make a big difference?
-
Hiya guys
I've noticed since changing my Title of my forum from:
Talk Nightlife | Nightlife and Clubbing forum for the UK
to
Talk Nightlife | Nightlife Forum and Clubbing Guide for the UK (current)
... That its jumped from 22nd to 10th in google for term "nightlife forum"
Am wondering, because of the on site optimisation tool telling me I should put the keyword to the front to something like eg:
Nightlife Forum | Talk Nightlife Clubbing Guide for the UK
Will changing the Keyword and putting it to front of the Title make a big difference?
Your thoughts please guys
Cheers Luke
-
Yep, I like this one too Dana.
I'm sure "UK Clubbing Guide" would have more searches than "Clubbing Guide for the UK" anyway.
-
I'm not a fan of stop words in titles. How about
Nightlife Forum | UK Clubbing Guide | Talk Nightlife
What do you think? I basically just got rid of the "and, for, the" - But it remains very readable.
-
Thanks for your responses guys, very much appreciated. The next step would be to change it, but advise to changing it to what? in your opinion the best.
Talknightlife is a nightlife forum for the Uk (hope you guessed that)
... so it's currently Talk Nightlife | Nightlife Forum and Clubbing Guide for the UK
what you you reckon? changing it to
A: Nightlife Forum and Clubbing Guide for the UK | Talk Nightlife
B: Nightlife Forum | Talk Nightlife a Clubbing Guide for the UK
Nightlife Forum | Talk Nightlife | Clubbing Guide for the UK
I'm ranking 1st for "Uk nightlife forum" / "Nightlife Forum UK" so I don't really need UK at the front.
Thanks for your help so far guys, let me know more your thoughts
Regards Luke
-
Hi Luke!
It is my experience that title tag is still a weight element and the last one. What that means is that first word has more effect then second that has more then third etc. We are not talking about any dramatic but a little little more.
The reason for this and the strongest reason why you should "weight" your most relevant (important) keyword to the front is how the user interact with your search result in the SERP.
Users do a vertical reading which means that our eyes will catch the first 2-3 words while browsing downwards in the SERP, so if dont have your relevant keywords within that "area" you will get less clicks.
That is also why, we in most case (not always) want the brand keyword last, so we can keep as relevant keywords in the beginning of the title as possible.
Also if you auto generate a lot of your titles, it's smarter that if you title is longer than the ~63 characters the brand tag falls out than the relevant keyword for that page.Also a note, if Talk Nightlife Clubbing Guide for the UK is your "brand tag" I would recommend to rework it to something shorter, to leave more room to page specific information to the left.
-
Actually blogs are talking too much about link building that it seems like on-page optimization is less important or some even come to me for link building on their website with any on-page optimization was not proper.
I think On-page optimization is really important and out of all the on-page factors title tag is one of the most important one. I think if title tag can be handled correctly you can actually beat your very powerful competitors for some of the highly competitive key phrases.
-
Hi Luke,
Most of the initial jump was probably due to the fact that "nightlife forum" wasn't actually in your original page title. You had the 2 individual words in your title but they weren't placed next to each other, thus Google reads them as "nightlife" and "forum".
By putting them together it signals to Google that you're trying to rank for that phrase.
As for the placement of keywords at the beginning of your page title, sure it helps a little. I usually recommend having the brand/web site name at the end. I'd go for something like:
Nightlife Forum and UK Clubbing Guide | Talk Nightlife
Your site will rank for "Talk Nightlife' anyway, it doesn't need to be at the beginning of the title.
Hope this helps!
-
In short yes it makes a difference. However Primary Keywords vs Branded Keywords can influence your CTR.
If you have a high affinity Brand I certainly would consider putting those at the front of the page otherwise I have always follow the specific to general format.
-
I too have seen this kind of change make a big difference, but sometimes it;s short term and the page sinks back down to where it was before. I think a new page title makes Google bot temporarily "curious" and it thinks "Oh I've found a new page!" Remember, bots aren't as smart as humans, so it takes them a while to catch on.
It's great that your page moved up. Watch it for a month and see what happens. If it retains its position, then maybe it's a good tactic to try on other pages
It could be that the change you made was a better "title" for the actual page. Finding better, more accurate, concise and descriptive titles that really hone in on what your page is about is always a good thing.
Hope that helps!
-
Yes! It's really make big different, my experience, i'm working on many of keywrods very compete last month, keyword in begin of title help me ranking better (from 14 > 4 within 4 day, 8 > 5 within 7 day... ).
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
-
How many keywords should I optimize a page for?
Hi, There is a lot of debate going on on whether to use a single keyword per page or multiple keywords per page. What I know for sure is that it is not advisable to repeat the same exact keyword in different pages. I need to optimize product pages, categories and pages for an online store and still do not know if it is better to: 1-work with one main keyword per page plus latent semantic keywords, 2-to optimize a page for multiple different keywords (2 to 4 keywords) which are strongly related to the main topic or to the product sold in a particular product page 3- use single keyword for each page (and no more than one keyword per page). Some seo gurus argue this is the best way to get higher ranking for that particular page in the serps. My personal opinion would be 1 or 2, but I would like to hear what you suggest and think about it. Any suggestion or opinion is welcome and appreciated. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | cinzia090 -
2000 Active pages 404 on LIVE Ecommerce site - what will google do now?
Hi All, One of my ecommerce site having more than 20,000 pages from that one of the categories having 2000 pages showing 404 and still taking time for developer to fix this issue and may be they will be able to fix after 2-3 days so is this okay with google or google will take any action during this period? Thanks! Dev
On-Page Optimization | | devdan0 -
Branding vs. Keyword Optimization for Company title.
I have a new SEO client that I am working on putting together an optimization strategy and have come across something that has me second guessing. Reach out to Moz Community... The client is a doctor who runs a tattoo removal clinic out of his office. Technically they are two separate businesses: doctors office and tattoo removal clinic. The tattoo removal clinic is my client. They have an independent website where they generate leads. The website is not the brand name. It is [city]tattooremoval.com. The logo on the site, heading, footer all reflect the web URL. The actual brand name for the company is used in all the directory listings, facebook page, google+, basically everywhere else on the internet. When drafting up new meta titles, putting together content, everything really, the website URL has primary keywords included making it way more convenient to use that. However I'm not sure how it will look to the search engines about having everything pointing to the site be one company title and when you get to the site not see the company title in the logo or titles and such. The company name is just down in the corner somewhere on the page. Anyone with any experience to a similar issue? On one hand I think I'm over thinking it, not having the brand name on the home page title tag shouldn't be a huge deal if the website delivers value to the customer. On the other hand I don't see a lot of companies that do this online in general (especially with larger brands), although research shows a many of companies in this niche using the [city] + keyword (or vise vera).
On-Page Optimization | | bricegump0 -
Changing the url of a page
Hello. I would like to change the url of a page. It currently has very few inbound links. I would set up a 301 redirect to the new url. Is there anything else I should take into account before changing the url? Is there a downside to changing a url? Do inbound links carry the same value when a 301 redirect is involved? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
I have 75 pages with missing meta tag descriptions. So I add them or do they make no sense?
I have 75 pages with missing meta tag descriptions. So I add them or do they make no sense?
On-Page Optimization | | sarthakss0 -
Changing the Home Page Title
The following question is for an eCommerce site: We have a home page title that has been the same for a few years. I would like to keep the keywords that already exist, but move them into different positions based on seasonality. Format will be (company name) | (keywords). Current format (company name) - (keywords). Rest of the page titles onsite are formatted (keyword)/(product name) | (company name) I think having the same keywords, but in a different order wouldn't hurt us in the SERPs. What are your thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | kennyrowe0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Duplicate Page Title
Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos
On-Page Optimization | | athosk0 -
Will duplicate content supplied from a hotel provider damage my website, or simply just the pages that it appears on?
Hi, I currently have a lot of hotel listings pages with little or no content, as I'm scared that if I place duplicate hotel descriptions on the pages then Google will stop ranking the page. I've found that having descriptions of some kind do help conversion significantly, so I'm considering generating unique hotel descriptions on each main page (page 1 in each set of listings) - these are the pages that Google indexes. On subsequent pages (page 2, page 3 etc.) I'm thinking about resorting to displaying the duplicate affiliate content hotel descriptions - these pages can be crawled but are set to noindex. My question is, do you think this is likely to have an effect on my website in the rankings, and as a result push my primary pages (that contain 100% unique content) down in SERPs. Thanks Mike
On-Page Optimization | | mjk260