Testing Your Homepage Title Tag
-
It can be a scary thing to change your homepage title tag to get the best results in the SERP while also maintaining your rankings. You obviously want to be irresistible and clickworthy… so how much time do you give before changing it up to test again?
-
Hi Nathan,
I generally A/B test every element I'm considering changing, but due to the nature of meta data this doesn't really work for title testing. I'm therefore pretty meticulous about research and strategy before I make any changes.
I would say that the frequency really depends on your level of traffic. If you have 100,000 visitors a month, I would consider figures reliable and safe (from the point of view of not messing around TOO much) to change it every two months and monitor results. If your traffic is 1,000 visitors a month, you might have to leave the experiment running longer (perhaps 4 months) to get reliable statistics.
Good luck!
-
Ahh, got ya. That's a great question, I'll look forward to reading the replies. I personally don't mess with the home page title tag, but have tweaked some of the blog post title tags. I normally just wait and see if I notice a chance 30 days after I change the title, but nothing real scientific.
-
It's not about a single site of mine in particular - just a discussion thread. I'm curious how often most of the mozzers go about changing their title tags when testing them out. And what best practices they use.
-
Hey Nathan, I think it would depend on what your overall goals are, what the title tag you have now is, etc. If you look at seoMoz's title tag you'll notice they don't have a call to action or anything in their title tag. They have developed the brand.
In regard to your site, have you built a brand for it? Are you selling merch? Is it a blog? Does the content on the home page change often?
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
-
Is there another option for User Testing besides Usertesting.com
I loved the presentation Phil Sharp did about A/B testing using User Testing. I would love to use his company UserTesting.com, but their minimum package is for $7500! I'm a small business and certainly cannot afford that. Is there another option for the small business owner?
Search Behavior | | RoxBrock1 -
Homepage & Subdomain Love Story...
Hi, Here's the situation: There's this website URL.com which is a search engine for a certain purpose (android developers). In fact, the homepage and maybe the "about" page are the only pages sitting on URL.com, all of the other inner pages (hundreds of thousands) are generated within one main Sub-Domain - X.URL.com Also, the analytics is tracking only X.URL.com because those inner pages are the only ones to attract organic traffic. So, in Analytics we see URL.com as referral traffic to X.URL.com Also, in WebmasterTools under "Links to your site" we see like half a million links from URL.com to X.URL.com Is this situation normal, do you think it may impact SEO in any way? Last remark, organic traffic is growing in a great way to the inner pages generated by the search engine, which as said sitting under x.URL.com Thanks
Search Behavior | | Yoav_Vilner0 -
Dupe Content: Canonicalize the Wordpress Tag or NoIndex?
Mozzers, Here we go. I've read multiple posts for years on taxonomy dupe content. In fact, I've read 10 articles tonight on taxonomies and categories. A little background: I am using Wordpress SEO with the Yoast plugin. **Here is the scenario: We have 560 tags - some make sense - some do not. ** What do I do? Do I not worry about it? Matt Cutts said twice that I should not stress about it, because in the worse non-spammy case, Google may just ignore the duplicate content. Matt said in the video, “I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.” (Found Via Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459). Do I NoIndex,Follow the Tags? Yoast and a Moz post both say I should NoIndex and Follow the Tags. From the post: "Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed." BUT! **The tags have been indexed for YEARS! And both articles go onto say **"if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them" (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). So do I deindex tags that have been indexed for years? I checked the analytics, and in the past month, tags have brought in less than 1% of traffic, but they are bringing in traffic. Do I canonicalize the tags? Canonicalize the URL from "http://domain.com/blog/tag/addiction/" to "http://domain.com/blog/" ? And if I canonicalize, would you canonicalize to the /blog or to the base /tag? Thanks for any and all help. I just want to clarify this issue. One of the reasons is because I received a Moz Report with a TON of dupe content warning from the tags and categories.
Search Behavior | | Thriveworks-Counseling2 -
How to test a site for usability with hundreds users and get genuine feedback?
My question is twofold; firstly is there a recommended company that I could use to get feedback on my site usability. Ideally I would like this company to arrange a focus group of a couple hundred people that fit into the right demographic and organise a report on the opinions of the group and the issues faced. Secondly an in-house understanding of usability Now I would like to think that when I review a site for usability I am not biased in any way. But I believe that if I look at the page that I have created or even collaborated on that I will always miss usability issues as I frankly think my/our creation is amazing. I'm interested to know how people rank and check their site usability and what factors rank highest in their assessments i.e. the tools you use and how you use them.
Search Behavior | | Stefan-Thorpe0 -
Is a Shorter Page Title Better?
Is there any evidence that SEs give a greater weighting to keyword phrases in the page title if there are less characters? For example: 1. "Buy Silver Bullion" 2. "Buy Silver Bullion Coins Bars Rounds Easily Privately Securely" The key phrase I am trying to optimize for is "Buy Silver Bullion." To my knowledge, current practices would say the 2nd phrase is better optimized since it contains more keywords and it has a few USPs. But is there any evidence that the 1st example would be higher ranked in google for the phrase "Buy Silver Bullion" because it is more focused than the 2nd?
Search Behavior | | nwright0 -
Has anyone yet seen any Search or User benefits from implementing any Schema tags (as in Schema.org) ? Thanks
Schema tags have been around for a while, am really interested in knowing of any noticeable benefits seen by anyone who has had experience of implementing Schema tags.
Search Behavior | | SimonCullum0 -
Google Is Displaying An Alt image tag as my homepage's page title
Google is randomly displaying the alt image tag as the page title for my homepage. It happens when you search for the brand name, but the page title appears as "BrandName Logo" (obviously not "BrandName"). Has anybody seen this happen before?
Search Behavior | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Homepage redirect dilemma, need some advice!
Our site is built to show users things to do around their current location. For this reason we redirect users to a city specific home page based on their location. To do this we detect users IP address and 302 redirect them to the closest city with events. Our site is below and you should be able to see the 302 redirect. fyifly.com My concern is that I always here not to use 302 redirects as they don't pass link juice through. I don't think 301 redirect would be good either as it is not a permanent redirect. Any advice on how you think the best way to treat this would be great or if you think the 302 direct is the best solution.
Search Behavior | | lsujoe0