Title Tags in 2013
-
For blog posts do you think it is better to use something like "Atlanta Plumbing Company" or "Choosing an Atlanta Plumbing Company" (article title). I have been using the article titles but I think it might be hindering rankings a bit. I use to use the keyword but it seems a bit spammy now.
I want to create titles for the readers but rank well too.
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
-
Jason,
Think of how many individual blog posts you're going to need to write in 2013, 2014, and beyond (one hundred, two hundred, more?) and how much social outreach you'll have to accomplish over that time in order to build the blog into a really effective marketing tool for your company. Then you gotta wonder how you can maintain interest and focus writing all those posts on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company". On top of that, gotta wonder how many of those social profiles you reach out to week after week after week who are going to want to share your content on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company". And then you gotta wonder about the readers and how their interest will be maintained while you're writing only on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company".
I'd say that you're on the right path in thinking that your titles seem a bit spammy, but you've gotta get off the path and get on the highway. On the highway, your blog can reach its greater potential--a vehicle that can reach and engage a community that is hungry for a wide variety of topics within your theme.
As someone here at SEOmoz is fond of saying, content needs to be exceptional, inspirational, unique, credible, fun, and beneficial to share in order to accomplish it's goal of being an effective marketing tool. I would start with that, when contemplating your titles, and then write your posts accordingly.
-
It's really important that users find what they are looking for in that the title should be as descriptive as possible otherwise they will just bounce off the page. That said, I would try to ensure that you word your titles well for SEO by keeping irrelevant stop words to a minimum and keep your primary target keywords or phrase early in the page title
-
Hey Jason, I am glad that someone really asked this question!
Well everybody wants people to read whatever they are writing on their blog and for that one of the ways is to rank the blog well in search engines from the searchable keywords like you have mentioned in your question.
Actually the keywords that you are trying to focus is one of the money making keywords within your niche and that is why it’s more competitive than other keywords that you are not focusing. I think the better idea is create natural titles that may or may not focus keywords all the time but focus on the content on the page...and give indication to Google and users about what the page is all about...
As far as targeting keywords is concern try to focus on long tail keywords with less competition so that you blog will easily rank and get some attention and if it will really worth reading you will see people share far and wide naturally through social networks, emails and all other possible mediums.
Hope this helps!
-
Have you glanced at SEOMoz's best practices for title tags? - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
In my opinion you should have the title as natural as possible and that should be the a clear label as to what your article is about. Have you looked at examples such as how SEOMoz has titles on their blog - article title | brand
In my experience you will also pick up more long tail traffic with more natural titles such as using the full title rather than just a specific keyword. It also looks less spammy and over-optimized which is something to take into consideration after recent Google updates.
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 can i safely eliminate wordpress unused tags?
Hi Over several years I used many tags ( more then 1000 ) on my wordpress website 😞 but most of them haven't any view and haven't any clicks on google search . now I want delete this old - useless - unused tags but I'm worried about seo problem like many 404 pages and problems like this . Does anyone have safe way to delete these wordpress tags? how can i safely remove them?
Technical SEO | | markdoel0 -
Hreflang tag implentation
Hi, We've had hreflang tags implemented on our site for a few weeks now, and while we are seeing some improvements for the regional subfolders I wanted to double check I had the tags implemented correctly (a couple of examples are below). However while the regional subfolder sites are now ranking instead of the US site for some keywords, some key search terms are still returning the US site. Could this be due to incorrect implementation for that specific page? Due to complications with using Magento we're implementing the tags in the site maps. Also magento appears to be inserting a rel canonical tag automatically for each page and self referencing e.g. On www.example.com/uk/security-cameras (one of the pages we're having issues with) the canonical tag is http://www.example.com/uk/security-cameras" />. Is this an issue? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. <url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
Technical SEO | | ahyde
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits/1080p</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>0 -
Dynamically changing a title with javascript
Hi, I asked our IT team to be able to write custom page titles in our CMS and they came up with a solution that writes the title dynamically with javascript. When I look on the page, I see the title in the browser, but when I look in the source code, I see the original page title. I am thinking that Google won't see the new javascript title, so it will not be indexed and have no impact on SEO. Am I right ?
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
A good META title for a front page....
Hi, We recently asked for some pointers to use on our site bit.ly/4Cogch as one of our SEOmoz private questions. One of the points that was picked up was that the title of the homepage looked quite spammy: Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner I completely see this however I've checked out our competition and no one seems to be doing things any better and the SEOmoz On Page SEO tool seems to like it so I'm not sure what changes to make. Does anybody have any inspiration that I could possibly use? It was suggested that Google is quite brand focused and so I should integrate the company name but how else would you change things, bearing in mind the ink and toner market that we're focusing on? Thanks for your help! Chris
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Canonical tags
How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content
Technical SEO | | Boodreaux
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL. By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice? Not sure if that question makes sense. 🙂 Poo1 -
Meta Description,Title
If I changed the meta description and title of the post from the existing one how long will it may take to get indexed in Google. How can I fasten the process of indexing the changed meta description and title. Thanks, Venkee.
Technical SEO | | Venkee0 -
Page Titles where URL customization is limited
Hi all, I'm working for a new company which has several websites built on the Miva Merchant 5.5 platform. I'm new to SEO and trying to improve one specific category of products. With Miva the URL structure is set to: "category/" or "product/". I would have liked to have the ability to create URLs like "bike/beach-cruisers/mens-red-hawaiian.html". Since I cannot do that I'm trying to determine the best product name and page titles. Currently all of our titles have the word "bike". So when a category page is displayed, which shows over 100 products I get flagged in my campaign for over using the keyword "bike". However, if I take the work "bike" out of the page title I'm concerned that it would hurt us in the SERPs. Another factor that I'm getting flagged for on my campaign is the fact that our navigation uses the same key words repeatedly in each link. I'm not sure if it's really hurting us or not. Below is an example. I'm looking for some input on recommendations for product names and page titles. Below are some examples of what I'm working with. Any input or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Menu Sample: Bikes-Street-Blue-Mens Bikes-Street-Blue-Womens Bikes-Street-Blue-Kids Bikes-Street-Orange-Mens Bikes-Street-Orange-Womens Bikes-Street-Orange-Kids Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Blue-Mens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Blue-Womens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Blue-Kids Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Orange-Mens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Orange-Womens Bikes-Beach-Cruiser-Orange-Kids Current Page Titles/Name: Mens Bike Street Blue | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/mens-bike-street-blue.html Mens Bike Street Orange | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/mens-bike-street-orange.html Womens Bike Street Blue | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/womens-bike-street-blue.html Womens Bike Street Orange | XYZ Bike Mfg. - product/womens-bike-street-orange.html
Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact0 -
Duplicate title issue
During the crwal SEO moz found duplicate title problems with quite a good number of pages. This was because my site has test questions like http://www.skill-guru.com/12/scjp-5-mock-test/questions and when user does next or previous, they can traverse to different pages but the title and descrition would remain same. How can this probkem be resolved ?
Technical SEO | | skill-guru2