Title and Url Agreement
-
In the case of trying to hit a wide taxonomy, is it better to keep your title and URL in agreement, or to vary them slightly for exact search matching.
For instance this blog post which has the following url:
http://www.simplifiedbuilding.com/blog/build-your-own-standing-desk/
has the title "Make a Stand Up Desk - Better Working, Longer Living"
The ideas is that build and make are similar words and "stand up" and "standing" are also similar.
So what is the better way to go?
-
Since many studies now see the H1 as having far much less impact (but certainly a bit) I would recommend the following based on anecdotal search index data, "light scientific" studies around H1 impact, the impact of a title for sharing and semantic clustering:
1. Write the page title/H1 with sharing in mind first and search a close second. (given the decreased emphasis on H1s) and the increased weight of sharing.
1B. At this level of detail I would go for the fun "clicky" title for CTR increases.
2. Consider that google (in this day) sees a very clear relationship between 'stand up desk' and "standing desk'. It's just as likely that these variations support each other as much or better than repeating the same term. In your copy, I'd say that even the word "sitting" in (it's very opposition) is related to and supports your "standing" targets.
3. Your URL answers one query while your title/H1 responds to a slightly different query increasing your halo of search reach. At this point I like the semantic cluster rising between your URL and title. And you've got juicy related terms like "working" in the title. This carries through in your content.
4. "Good content" and natural content will have variations on target terms, related terms etc.. thus we can infer perceived content quality to go up (since you're not overly focused on term repetition)
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "varying taxonomy" but variance is much more human and natural than uniformity of every component down the page. But the link below seems relevant although there's tons of great SI articles out there that should also help with your question.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1224698
" text within each node indicates a higher relevance of the materials to the taxonomic classification."
Hope that's of some help.
-
So you're saying that the H1 should "agree" with the keyword density and that would be a better approach.
What about the aspect of varying taxonomy. Does anyone have any thoughts about this?
-
Hi,
I have seen your URl and title according to my suggestion if you are using standing instead of stand up is better for your page optimization because standing word has good keyword density in your page body. It is placed in your content and H1. It is better to use standing word in title also instead of "stand up". you can use "standing desk " as your keyword.
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
-
Hey guys so i changed my title on the website
The old one was very keyword stuffed and repeated words. see its now gone from search for those main keywords do you think its just playing now and it will be back ?
On-Page Optimization | | johan81 -
To update or not to update news URLs ?
We manage a huge daily news website in my small country - keeping this a bit mysterious in case competitors are reading 🙂 Our URL structure is www.companyname.com/news/categoryofnews/title-of-article?id=articleid In this hyperreactive news world, title of articles change frequently (may be ten times a day for the main stories). The question we debate is : should we reflect the modification of the title in the URL or not ? Example : "Trump says he wants to ban search engines" would have URL http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678 Later in the day the title becomes "Trump denies he suggested banning search engines". Should the URL be modified to http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-denies-he-suggested-banning-search-engines?id=12345678 (option A) or not (option B) ? In Google News it makes no difference because of the sitemap, but in Google organic things are different. At present (option B in place), Google apparently doesn't see that the article has been updated, and shows the initial timestamp which is visually (and presumably SEOwise) not good : our new news looks like old news. Modifiying the URL would solve that issue, but could, may be, create another one : the new URL, being considered a new article, would lose, the acquired weight of the previous one in terms of referrals, social trafic and so on. Or not ? What do you think is the best option ? Thanks for your expertise, Yves
On-Page Optimization | | yves678901 -
IMG ALT tags - should they be the same or the product title?
I have about 300 products. Should I make all my IMG ALT tags with my keywords, such as sea glass jewelry, sea glass necklace, sea glass bracelets? Or, should I make them what their title is, some of which do not pertain to the keyword, such as By the Sea. Some of my products do have keywords in them, but not all. I am hesitant on changing all the titles, as almost all URLs are indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
How dangerous are duplicate page titles
We ran a SEO crawl and on our report it flag up duplicate pages titles, we investigate further and found that these were page titles from the same product line that had more than one page, e.g 1-50 (products) 51-100 (products) with a next button to move to the following 50 products. These where flagged as duplicate page titles ".../range-1/page-1" and ".../range-1/page-2" These titles are obviously being read as duplicates but because they are the same range we do not know what the best course of action is. We want to know how detrimental these page titles will be to our SEO if at all. If anyone could shed some light on this issue it would be a massive help. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SimonDixon0 -
Ecommerce Product Subcategory URL
Our website has 5 main categories displayed in tabs in the header. The main landing page of each of the 5 categories is a paginated page (3pages- set up with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content) with a side bar which splits the main category into many subcategories. Each of these subcategories essentially filter the main landing page into more defined categories customers find useful (price/colour) BUT once clicked enter into a separate landing page. We have worked hard to avoid any duplicate content issues between these sub-landing pages and the main landing page. This was done as we wanted each of the subpages to organically rank (thus we went with this method rather than filters). Hope we didn't do the wrong thing there? The question is should these sub-landing pages route straight from home to have the best chance to get individually ranked or routed through the main category bearing in mind we have 5 main categories each with many subcategories. i.e. domain.co.uk/subcategory or domain.co.uk/category/subcategory Thanks in advance for any advice given.
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
URL length does it really make a difference
I am currently working redevloping my site, I have terribly long URL's according to SEOMoz, can someone cover the real benefit of my editing my URLs, and then putting in all of those redirects. Should I edit old material? My site has been in wordpressformat for a couple of years now.
On-Page Optimization | | copykatrecipes0