Impact of changing title and description.
-
When a site doesn't rank for keywords, is this advisable to keep changing the title, description and other on page factors of a page , say home page, until it ranks? Will that impact on improvement? Or else will it be counted in the negative side?
-
Hi Sam,
Though we relay on branding, social media, natural backlinks etc.., still RAW SEO helps websites to get traffic. That put me to raise this question.
Got your points and inputs. Will sure use them. thanks for your time.
-
Here's the way to look at it. When people search for "best London restaurants," Google doesn't really want to deliver results based on titles, descriptions, and other on-page factors. Google wants to deliver a list of the ten restaurants that human beings in London actually think are the best.
In short, Google is increasingly thinking like a human and not like a machine. I would ask yourself this question: Why does your website deserve to rank for that keyword? Does it deliver the best content and user experience on the Internet for the user intent behind that search term? Has your site built a brand so that people view you has an authority on that topic? If the answer is "no," then why should you rank highly?
Today, the key to "SEO" success is to build an online brand through the following process:
1. Build a great website on a technical SEO level (fast-loading, optimized for mobile, etc.) with a wonderful user experience (UX).
2. Publish original, authoritative content on the topics that would interest your audience.
3. Use public relations and social media to promote both your website as a whole and the content on the website
4. Repeat steps two and three indefinitely, and traffic, links, rankings, and more will grow naturally over time.
It's not easy, and it takes time. But nothing good ever comes quickly.
What I guess I am saying: To be successful today, think less like an "SEO" and more like a "marketer." What makes you special and differentiates you from other similar websites? What is your brand? How will you position the website? What's your messaging? Those questions are more important to answer today than those about keywords and links.
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
-
Open Graph Meta Description...
Does my html meta description tag have to be the same as my Open Graph meta description? I'm having problems pulling through my meta description into Google SERPs and I wondered if its because my 'OG' data is not consistent? Thanks Guys, Kay
Technical SEO | | eLab_London0 -
Impact of Non SEO Subdomains
My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program. One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots. Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain? What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
Resubmit sitemaps on every change?
Hello Mozers, Our sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing, and are successfully indexed. Every time pages are added to our store (ecommerce), we re-generate the xml sitemap. My question is: should we be resubmitting the sitemaps every time their content change, or since they were submitted once can we assume that the crawlers will re-download the sitemaps by themselves (I don't like to assume). What are best practices here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | yacpro131 -
Moving to New Domain - Ranking impact
I understand that when migrating to a new site, even if done perfectly (page level 301s etc) that rankings will drop in the short term and each site will be impacted differently. I picked up the following comment and was wanting to get a few experts thoughts on whether I can quote this to my client: "In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. "
Technical SEO | | steermoz80 -
Google Places Page Changes
We had a client(dentist) hire another marketing firm(without our knowledge) and due to some Google page changes they made, their website lost a #1 ranking, was disassociated with the places page and was placed at result #10 below all the local results. We quickly made some changes and were able to bring them up to #2 within a few days and restore their Google page after about a week, but the tracking/forwarding phone number the marketing company was using shows up on the page despite attempts to contact Google through updating the business in places management as well as submit the phone number as incorrect while providing the correct phone number. And because the client fired that marketing company, the phone number will no longer be active in a few days. Of course this is very important for a dental office. Has anyone else had problems with the speed and updating Google Places/Plus pages for businesses? What's the most efficient way to make changes like this?
Technical SEO | | tvinson0 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Google Change of Address with Questionable Backlink Profile
We have a .com domain where we are 301-ing the .co.uk site into it before shutting it down - the client no longer has an office in the UK and wants to focus on the .com. The .com is a nice domain with good trust indicators. I've just redesigned the site, added a wad of healthy structured markup, had the duplicate content mostly rewritten - still finishing off this job but I think we got most of it with Copyscape. The site has not so many backlinks, but we're working on this too and the ones it does have are natural, varied and from trustworthy sites. We also have a little feature on the redesign coming up in .Net magazine early next year, so that will help. The .co.uk on the other hand has a fair few backlinks - 1489 showing in Open Site Explorer - and I spent a good amount of time matching the .co.uk pages to similar content on the .com so that the redirects would hopefully pass some pagerank. However, approximately a year later, we are struggling to grow organic traffic to the .com site. It feels like we are driving with the handbrake on. I went and did some research into the backlink profile of the .co.uk, and it is mostly made up of article submissions, a few on 'quality' (not in my opinion) article sites such as ezine, and the majority on godawful and broken spammy article sites and old blogs bought for seo purposes. So my question is, in light of the fact that the SEO company that 'built' these shoddy links will not reply to my questions as to whether they received a penalty notification or noticed a Penguin penalty, and the fact that they have also deleted the Google Analytics profiles for the site, how should I proceed? **To my mind I have 3 options. ** 1. Ignore the bad majority in the .co.uk backlink profile, keep up the change of address and 301's, and hope that we can just drown out the shoddy links by building new quality ones - to the .com. Hopefully the crufty links will fade into insignificance over time.. I'm not too keen on this course of action. 2. Use the disavow tool for every suspect link pointing to the .co.uk site (no way I will be able to get the links removed manually) - and the advice I've seen also suggests submitting a reinclusion request afterwards- but this seems pointless considering we are just 301-ing to the new (.com) site. 3. Disassociate ourselves completely from the .co.uk site - forget about the few quality links to it and cut our losses. Remove the change of address request in GWT and possibly remove the site altogether and return 410 headers for it just to force the issue. Clean slate in the post. What say you mozzers? Please help, working myself blue in the face to fix the organic traffic issues for this client and not getting very far as yet.
Technical SEO | | LukeHardiman0 -
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