Am I keyword stuffing my titles?
-
I run a site where I answer questions. As I answer each question I choose a title for the page. I have been trying to get good keywords in my titles, but now I am wondering if I have been keyword stuffing them and perhaps I should be more succinct.
So, let's say I had a question about a sore back. Here would be the title tag I would use:
Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help. | My Main Keyword
That's a fictitious example, but the idea is that I would be trying to get the keywords "back", "sore", "spinal", "pain", "relief" "help" and my main website keyword into the title.
As I'm writing this I'm seeing the folly in this. I think it would likely be much better to simply have a title of
Why is my back sore?
So, I have three questions:
1. Is it better to have a succinct title targeting one keyword/keyword phrase than to get lots of keywords in my title?
2. Should I be putting my main keyword after each of my title? Shortly after doing this on 1700+ pages I was #1 for my main keyword. But, I was also doing other things as well to boost my presence for this keyword.
3. If I decide to do more succinct titles, how would you suggest I go about running a test to see which is better?
Looking forward to your responses! Thanks!
-
If the title is relevant to the content then that's good, but from a technical sense: You shouldn't repeat any word in a title more than twice, and each instance of that word should be separated by at least one other word. Then, you have to think about what the titles are going to be on your other pages, I'd say you're more in danger of keyword canibalization within your title in that example than of keyword stuffing (assuming the rest of the site is about back pain, etc...).
-
Ah, thanks EGOL!
So, I will experiment with taking the site keyword off of the end, but keep doing what I am doing with my question titles.
But, perhaps, if I am writing an article about a specific problem I will have a succinct title there.
-
"spamming keywords"
I think that "spamming" occurs when you have keywords in the title that are not descriptive of the article.....
or.... when you just make a big list of keywords without composing them into a coherent question or statement...
I think that "Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help." is not in the "spam" category. (although I might shorten it down to about 60 characters)
-
"Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help."
I like the above for the reasons below.
-- I believe that questions elicit clicks better than statements.
-- You have lots of potential keywords in the title tag. Will work great for pulling in long tail traffic
I believe that the succinct title is good when you have a very powerful site and are gunning for a very basic and difficult keyword. However, if you use that succinct title on lots of pages then you will run into duplication. The longer title will diversify your optimization and pull a greater diversity of traffic.
-
1. Try to avoid spamming keywords into your titles. Keep them Short(ish), informative and helpful.
Maybe a title of "Why is my back sore? asked in Back & Neck Pain". This assumes your categories questions, so the "Back & Neck Pain" bit is your category title.
2. Having a keyword in thousands of page title is not going to be of any significant benefit to your site and it rankings.
3. I would gauge the success by simply applying your new found titling technique to the next few questions you process, follow their success and compare to previous questions.
Keep in mind that your existing 1700 pages may be getting ranked well for phrases which are well optimised in your current titling system. perhaps only apply the new technique to new questions only.
Good luck
-
There is a lot to this question. I think the way you are doing titles now is probably great for increasing the click through, mostly because they are in context. I would venture to guess you may be able to get more impressions by changing this up, but I always recommend quality over quantity. This being said I have NO IDEA what your traffic goals/stats look like. Good Luck!
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
-
Long Title Tags
Hi guys, We have product e-commerce title tags which are over 60 characters - around 80 plus. The reason we added them in there is to incorporate
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork214
more information for Google. The format of these title tags are: Name + Colour + Rug Type + Origin Name = for people searching for the name of the rug
Color = people searching for a specific color
Type = The type of rug (e.g. normal or designer)
Origin = Where the rug is for. So this title will cover people searching for: People searching for designer rugs, the specific colour and also where it comes from. This then results in the title tag going way over 60 characters - around 80-90 characters. -- Would it be wise to try and shrink it down to under 60 characters, and what would be a good approach to do this? Cheers.0 -
Organic keyword ranking drops across the board?
Howdy Moz, I have noticed a common anomaly across the majority of my client accounts (see attached image). Have lost thousands of organic keywords worldwide? (no loss in UK rankings though which are the ones that matter) Has there been an algo update? Seems strange. Thanks, Joshua nYP3i
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AscentGroup0 -
I have 2 keywords I want to target, should I make one page for both keywords or two separate pages?
My team sells sailboats and pontoon boats all over the country. So while they are both boats, the target market is two different types of people... I want to make a landing page for each state so if someone types in "Pontoon Boats for sale in Michigan" or "Pontoon boats for sale in Tennessee," my website will come up. But I also want to come up if someone is searching for sailboats for sale in Michigan or Tennessee (or any other state for that matter). So my question is, should I make 1 page for each state that targets both pontoon boats and sailboats (total of 50 landing pages), or should I make two pages for each state, one targeting pontoon boats and the other sailboats (total of 100 landing pages). My team has seen success targeting each state individually for a single keyword, but have not had a situation like this come up yet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanMaster0 -
Keyword stuffing
Hi all. I'm working on this page - http://www.alwayshobbies.com/dolls-houses - for the term 'dolls houses'. It's not doing great at the minute (23rd in GUK) and I was wondering if it might be down to the volume of exact match keywords on the page (32). If not, does anyone have any other pointers? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
H1 Page Title Tag Placement
I'm a little confused over the correct area to place a H1 title Tag. When I look at Wordpress templates and published Wordpress sites, it suggests placing the H1 tag within the header area. However, SEO companies and other well postioned sites place the H1 title tag at the start of the main content area. What is the correct and/or best practice for placing H1 page title tags? Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Keyword cannibalization
I ran the SEOMoz onpage diagnostic, and i got an alert for keyword cannibalization. My taxonomy is: www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/category (category page) www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword (supporting page) Links will be exact match in the primary navigation. www.mysite.com anchor text "category" => www.mysite.com/category www.mysite.com anchor text "category keyword" => www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword www.mysite.com/category anchor text "category keyword" => www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword and example would be /IT-support linking with anchor text "IT Support Servers" => /IT-Support/IT-Support-Servers I'm not going to have a cannibalization problem, am I?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
How important is sticking to an exact keyword?
The latest article I'm writing for my site is "Friends With Benefits Rules"... So the first part of my question is, what does SEOMoz advocate as being the ideal # of times to include the entire key phrase in the article? I know nobody but Google knows for certain, but is 4 (including in H1's etc.) generally considered enough, other than in the page title? Second part is, what is the consensus about how important is it to stick to the exact keyword? For the example I gave, is it just as good to include a comma, E.g. "...friends with benefits, rules..." or a hyphen "Friends with Benefits - Rules for..."? One thing I'm unclear about on this topic is stop words and plurals. I've been told before that Google ignores stop words, but results for searches with or without the word "how," for example produce very different results... Same thing with plurals. In any case, all of the above is assuming that the quality of the content would not be affected in either case...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030 -
Do keywords for my homepage matter?
Prob the most n00b question of all, but once I understand this I will be able to research on my own from here: If a search engine produces results by the keywords from individual website posts/pages, then how are the keywords I choose for my homepage so important if the general homepage meta-tag keywords are essentially ignored by the search engines? Should I repeat my primary keywords on EVERY post, in addition to the ones that relate to that individual post or am I misunderstanding something fundamental? My new site is http://splatterMUSIC.com and I want to be at the top of the results for anyone wanting to watch music vlogs, album reviews, music lessons, funny music-related videos, new non-major label music videos, and all kinds of other concert footage, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOsolver0