Product Title Formating Question

[MEldridge]

The majority of the products I sell require lengthy product titles, I have 600+ items that have titles over 70+ characters. In the interest of reducing the character count (Product Feeds) I'm trying to eliminate unnecessary "stop words" in the titles, such as "and", "with" etc..

I've listed an example of a current product listing below, followed by two different formats to reduce the character count. Which one if any is better for SEO or should I leave my titles alone and stick with my original format?

Current Listing Example:

• DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses with Black Frame and Clear Anti-Fog Lens

Suggested Listing Example:

• DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses-Black Frame-Clear Anti-Fog Lens
• DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses/Black Frame/Clear Anti-Fog Lens

[MEldridge]

Hi James,

I agree 100% with your statement. I wanted to get the SEOmoz communities opinion on my product title changes to see if my ideas are worth implementing.

[TellThemEverything]

Don't miss the obvious - title is a conversion tool not just for SEO. This is what makes your customers click on your page in SERPs and on your category pages. You should consider making the titles (and meta descriptions) better at "selling the click" not just from a keyword SEO point-of-view..

[MEldridge]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your quick response.

My product titles are formated by Brand-Style Name-Product Type-Product Feature. It's much easier for a human to read and seems to work well for long-tail searches. These products are also nested in a keyword optimized section page.

I appreciate your advice, but I want to keep the names easier for humans to read.

[baptisteplace]

HiMEldridge,

Stopwords can be removed from the title but it's always necessary. For the case you gave, I would dig into search volume of product base name, or brand name, with your additional features : black frame and anti-fog lens.

You get a more clean title with the focus on the main article (DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses) and you can put the additional properties in the page, close to the page title. You may also use your lengthy title on the H1/H2 of the site and use the smaller one for the head title, giving your page more variations on the product name.

Of course if the search volume for product + property exists, I would only remove the stop words.

[scanlin]

I agree that 'with' and 'and' are unnecessary.I would delete the '-' and '/' and just use a string of words:

DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses Black Frame Clear Anti Fog Lens

From an SEO point of view you need to ask yourself what phrases users who are looking for that product would search for. The category (safety glasses)? the brand (DeWalt)? I doubt they would search for marketing words like "Dual Comfort" or things that seem secondary "clear".

I would play with the Google Keyword tool and see if there are any surprising matches. Actually, I just did and found that "safety glasses" is by far the most common term from the above set. I would be tempted to put the category first, followed by the brand, and then maybe some secondary words.

Safety Glasses DeWalt Black Frame Clear Anti Fog Lens

[13375auc3]

I've recently done this with our products. A few things to keep in mind:

-"The advantage to keeping within that limit is just the fact that the user can read the entire thing"

-The most important keywords should be first.

-I don't think that slashes or dashes are necessary.

-Keywords should have some sort of search volume that drives relevant traffic to your pages.

That's all I've got for now.