Are Keywords Dying?
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I'm freelancing in SEO work, looking to make it a full time career, and as a result I'm juggling the prospect of having to pick and choose what area I spend most of my time on when working on client sites.
My background is in writing so I always lean towards creating content and engaging people via social media. But the standard is also to optimize page titles and - at a deeper level - descriptions for each page.
For larger sites, especially e-commerce with many product pages, this is a daunting task. Is it worth it or is the better strategy to focus the limited time available to content creation? Will page titles, etc. eventually become obsolete anyway?
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This is an advantage of being in-house, I think. When our buyers add new product lines, the spreadsheet of products goes through me and I give the names and descriptions a once-over to make sure they seem sensible and searchable. It's very rare that I actually take the time to optimize title tags -- really only on high-margin items with potentially high search volume. Then the products are uploaded and it's right from the start. As for going back to optimize products that have already been uploaded, that's a daunting task when you're staring down thousands of products. I'd only prioritize that if the product pages aren't getting any traffic whatsoever.
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For large ecommerce sites you need to incorporate automation into the process and dynamically generate optimized title tags, urls etc. everything has to line up. without good tags and urls good content will have less of a chance of ranking. Content creation is not an SEO job that is something you set strategy on and pass to a copywriter.
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