Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice
-
Greetings,
Im a new SEO and really knew nothing until signing up to SEOMoz. After reading the SEO101 and gathering as much information in a short period of time things started to become a little clearer.
So I started my first campaign used my new SEO knowledge and input all of my meta information. Then I waited a few days to see what happened with my search result.
We had never ranked for a single keyword before mind you. So a couple/few of days go by and I started punching in my keywords and looking through the pages. There I was page three. I was SO happy.
I read the entire SEO101 again, realized a little more about what I had to do. So I started changing everything up, adding pictures, I found out what a IMG ALT Attributes were in the HTML editor, bolded text and all the other things I missed the first time around.
Three days go by and I move up again. I start to notice my traffic is increasing and I am actually getting organic hits through search traffic. This has never happened before. I am over the moon. But I realize that I have my main focus keyword as the second key word in my title tag. So I switch the two words around, wait a few more days.
Here's why I ask my question. The original title tag was still showing up and I was on the first page for both keywords, and I could see both title tags when searching for either keyword.
So; Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice ?
Warmest regards,
Michael
Warning: adult site, NSFW
-
Testing different titles to see if you can improve your rankings for specific keywords or to focus on different keywords may be worthwhile but changing them for the sake of making a change is pointless.
-
I agree with both Moosa and Aran. I don't think constantly changing your page titles on a site-wide basis is going to help your rankings. It may actually have the opposite effect, depending on how you interpret Google's mysterious and upcoming "Over-Optimization" penalty.
However if you're page title's need improving and doing so will help you increase impressions, I wouldn't avoid it. I just wouldn't make a habit of tweaking them and changing them too often.
Like Aran said, if you've running a special promotion, have a major announcement, incredible new content, etc... I absolutely think changing the titles on relevant pages to reflect those things is a great idea for increasing CTR and conversions.
Moderation is the key on this I believe.
Hope this helps.
Anthony
-
First of all, welcome aboard. I always love to here of peoples first steps into SEO and the results they get.
My site has around 450 pages, thus its would be a major job for me to amend my page titles. Sites like SEOmoz have thousands of pages, and the vast majority of them are available in SERPs. Now as far as I know SEOmoz do not change their titles, again because it would be a massive job.
Saying that, if I run an offer or a sale on my website I will generally change my homepage title to reflect the fact I have a sale on, in the hope that the Sale text will be updated promptly in the SERPs and attarct a few extra click throughs.
In summary, no I dont think the freshness of your page titles has any positive effect on your SEO. But, It may impact your Click through rate (which I guess in turn could effect your SEO...now were going full circle).
Clear as mud?
-
Frequently changing title tag as a good practice… I don’t think so! I mean it’s good to change when you think the changed title can better tell search engine and users about the website but changing it frequently to get SEO boom… I don’t think it works!
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
-
Ecommerce SEO help
Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
How much content is it safe to change?
I have read that it is unsafe to change more than 20% of your site’s content in any update. The rationale is that "Changing too much at once can flag your site within the Google algorithm as having something suspicious going on." Is this true, has anyone had any direct experiences of this or similar?
Algorithm Updates | | GrouchyKids0 -
50% drop in search, no changes to site over 2 days, no notifications, A rank...
My URL is: http://applianceassistant.com
Algorithm Updates | | applianceassistant
With no changes to my site, I suddenly experienced a huge drop in search queries on Aug1. Your company has still given me an overall rating of A. I just thought you may be able to help or be interested in my case due to it's strange nature. Due to some suggestions on the webmaster forums, I have disavowed all low quality back links to the site, and I am currently working through each page trying to make the key words a little less spammy. Here are some screen shots of the action...
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-WgXUf-lvUyg/U-nrWNgspPI/AAAAAAAAAEI/imoI190LUns/s1600/Analytics_081214.tiff
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-srmvn288rr0/U-pxlwoycVI/AAAAAAAAAEg/ckmyX_2Sl_Y/s1600/PAGES_AUG.tiff
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-DVCYxhkutbQ/U-pxpQVfYfI/AAAAAAAAAEo/MN9PiLFT-zs/s1600/pages_july.tiff This appears to be almost a 50% 2 year set back. Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated0 -
Local SEO-How to handle multiple business at same address
I have a client who shares the same address and suite number with multiple business. What should be done to optimize their website and citations for local SEO? Is this a huge issue? What should we do so our rankings aren't affected. Will changes take a long time to take place? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | caeevans0 -
SinglePlatform's Restaurant Menu Across Web Properties vs "SEO-Optimized"
Surprised I wasn't able to find an existing answer given that SinglePlatform apparently serves 500,000 SMBs with menus that appear on over 150 publisher websites. Given Panda's razor-sharp intolerance for duplicate content, am I safe to assume that any claim of SinglePlatform's menu on a local restaurant being beneficial to your SEO is now spurious? If so, what's best way to handle this as a potential SEO liability while still having one of their nicely formatted restaurant menus on your site? For reference: http://www.openforum.com/articles/using-singleplatform-to-build-a-digital-presence Update May 7, 2012 Connected directly with the folks at SinglePlatform, and the answer here is a lot simpler than my over-thinking of it. The menu usually sits within an iFrame or widget so that's that. But the ability to truthfully show an up-to-date menu for any given establishment is a legit way to address the healthy amount of local search intent that seems to be directed at exactly that. Overall a pretty slick platform, looking forward to seeing how they grow into the SMB, local & mobile in the coming months, I think the space is ripe to benefit from products/services that take advantage of these sorts of economies of scale.
Algorithm Updates | | mgalica0 -
This Guy Is Turning SEO Upside Down
Hi, Everything my competitor does goes against everything I have learned about SEO so far. For starters: he registered a brand NEW domain and within a space of **4 months and ** has a top ranking for one of the most competitive search terms on Google. he uses scraped content the navigation is almost non-existent. his backlinks seem dodgy. 1-page sites with content that doesn not relate. Bunch of links to other websites too And yet his site stats are as follows: Domain Authority: 72 MozRank: 4.63 MozTrust: 4.72 Linking Root Domains: 1725 On further investigation I discoverd that he owns a SEO company and that they in fact have achieved a #1 rank in various niches such as life insurance, car insurance, mortgage etc. On his SEO site he actually promises a #1 ranking in less than 4 months. The sample sites he lists on there all achieved #1 over a 4 month period...of course he owns most of these domains and then just sells the leads... So, my question is how on earth does he do it? Do you have any ideas Zane
Algorithm Updates | | Springboks0 -
Recent changes to suggested search algorithm?
Our company recently had a "company name + scam" listing as #2 in suggested search, and yesterday, it miraculously disappeared. Has anyone else noticed similar changes in suggested search results? I hope it stick, I'm just trying to understand exactly what caused that 1 listing to vanish.
Algorithm Updates | | CareerBliss0 -
Google changing case of URLs in SERPs?
Noticed some strange behavior over the last week or so regarding our SERPs and I haven't been able to find anything on the web about what might be happening. Over the past two weeks, I've been seeing our URLs slowly change from upper case to lower case in the SERPs. Our URLs are usually /Blue-Fuzzy-Widgets.htm but Google has slowly been switching them to /blue-fuzzy-widgets.htm. There has been no change in our actual rankings nor has it happened to anyone else in the space. We're quite dumbfounded as to why Google would choose to serve the lower case URL. To be clear, we do not build links to these lower case URLs, only the upper. Any ideas what might be happening here?
Algorithm Updates | | Natitude0