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
-
Hreflang Tags - error: 'en' - no return tags
Hello, We have recently implemented Hreflang tags to improve the findability of our content in each specific language. However, Webmaster tool is giving us this error... Does anyone know what it means and how to solve it? Here I attach a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/a4AsqLNtF6J Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Unique use of nofollow tag
Love the community here. I just had a quick question about the using noindex, nofollow. We are a car dealership group that uses a website provider (cobalt). Since they provide the website they are the only ones with access to remove pages etc. We can add pages but only they can remove them. There are some pages we need to have removed but according to them they are unable to remove them, (I think the manufacture might mandate having some pages), anyway some of these pages literally have nothing on them, and there isn't really any useful content we could add to them. So we are using noindex on them to ensure that they stay out of search indices, but I am wondering if we should also use nofollow on them. If I understand nofollow correctly it just means search engines won't follow the links on the page, well for most of these pages the only links on them are the navigation, and since we don't plan on adding any content to these pages and we can't remove them should we use noindex and nofollow as a way to "remove" them from the site as much as we can?
Technical SEO | | Murdock_Auto_Group0 -
How similar do pages need to be to utilize the canonical tag
One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. They are both ranking for the same term. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here?
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain
Hey, My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise. The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples. Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051 OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well. Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page. But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
Totally confused by titles being too long!
We use a wordpress site and have tried some SEO plug-ins in the past. In the analysis, I am getting more than 2,000 pages have titles that are too long and from the results it looks like it was a result of one of these past SEO plug-ins. Do I need to go through and change all those titles? How bad is it that so many of the old blog posts are too long? Some are too long only in the archive link... So confused and hating the idea of reworking thousands of posts! Thanks y'all!
Technical SEO | | Longsphoto0 -
Duplicate Title Tags On Blogs
Hello Mozzers, I have a client who has a blog and articles section on their website, due to the amount of content they have in these section they have multiples pages so it would be like.. www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p1 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p2 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p3 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p4 All obvioulsy with seperate content in each blog/article posts but the meta descriptions on title tags for this p1,p2,p3,p4 and so on are all the same, is this a major issue? and if so how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0 -
Title Element Too Long Question
I have recently become a pro member of SEOmoz and I've been going through the crawl diagnostics summary in an attempt to fix some of the errors. Currently I have 2,167 pages where the title element is too long. I would like to fix this, but I have certain keywords present on all of the pages that I am ranking first for. I am afraid if I take these words out of my titles it will hurt my rank for those keywords. Is it better to leave the keywords in or remove them to get under the 70 character mark?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Google not using <title>for SERP?</title>
Today I noticed that Google is not using my title tag for one of my pages. Search for "covered call search" Look at organic result 6: Search - Covered Calls Covered call screener filters 150000 options instantly to find the best high yield covered calls that meet your custom criteria. Free newsletter.<cite>https://www.borntosell.com/search</cite> - CachedNow, if you click through to that page you see the meta title tag is:Covered Call ScreenerEven the cached version shows the title tag as Covered Call ScreenerI am not logged in, so I don't believe personalization has anything to do with it.Have others seen this before?It is possible that "search - covered calls" was the title tag 9 months ago (before I understood SEO); I honestly don't remember. I cleaned all my titles up at least 6 months ago.Can I force Google to re-index the page? Its content has changed a few times in the last few months, and Google crawls my site frequently according to webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | scanlin0