How different does each page tilte need to be?
-
I've got a site that is all about wood countertops. There are a few ways people can find info on wood tops.
- (main) wood countertops
- (main) butcher block
- butcher block counters
- wood counters
- hardwood countertops
- etc.
For the most part I want to rank for the two top key phrases because they pretty much cover all the other basis with google being as smart as it is. So they question is how different should each page title be?
Examples:
- Wood Countertops - Butcher Block Counters | by J. Aaron = index page
- Wood Counter tops - Butcher Block Counters - About Us | J. Aaron = about us page
- Cleaning Butcher Block - Wood Countertop Maintenance | J. Aaron = care & maintenance page
Would it be OK to use:
<title>Wood Countertops - Butcher Block Counters | by J. Aaron</title>
as the template for the whole site with the addition of the actual page subject as an additional piece of the sentence, like example 2 or would that be too similar? Also is that a good idea or should I commit to optimizing each page for a different key phrase? If so would you optimize the home page for the most searched for phrase and let the other pages back it up with the other search terms?
-
Hi Josh,
Keeping in mind I don't know anything about wood counters and kitchen islands, I would make this observation about your title:
<title>walnut kitchen island with undermount sink and tung-oil wood seal(65)er | J. Aaron</title>
1. Too long. You've only got about 65 spaces for a title, then Google clips off the rest. I limit titles to 60 spaces or less.
2. You've got what appears to be 2 related keywords (which you could probably rank for on one page) and a 3rd unrelated keyword in "tung oil wood seal."
3. "Walnut Kitchen Island" looks like a good long tail keyword to me (kitchen island would be short while adding the walnut is a longer tail qualifier).
4. The longer the tail, the more you qualify the buyer.
5. I tighter title would be: "Walnut Kitchen Island with Undermount Sink by J. Aaron"
6. Depending on your site structure you might have a page with a variety of Walnut Kitchen Islands on it with a link to a separate page with an undermount sink (which is what this revised title would suggest).
6. "Tongue Oil Wood Seal" seems like it should be on a page about how to protect and maintain your countertops.
7. Putting your store's name or your name on the page title is fine and standard practice when brand building. Some put it on the back as you do, some on the front and some not at all. If there is room, I put our store's name on the title, if not I leave it off.
8. If you're optimizing for local business, its fine to put your city, state or combination in the title.
9. I've got our store name and street address in the footer so it shows on every page. For pages I really want to kick butt locally on, I put the city, state in the title, otherwise I leave it off and let the footer do the work.
-
So you're saying as the pages get more dedicated I should up the description level like
<title>walnut kitchen island with undermount sink and tung-oil wood sealer | J. Aaron</title> (Is it a real good idea to keep the " | J. Aaron" in every title or can that go away. It's not like it's a brand that people know or even a product that people associate with brands at all.)
What if I have several pictures of very similar products with their own pages. Should I just set one up as the master page and put a canonical tag on the other "walnut kitchen island tops with undermount sinks and tung-oil sealers" to link to the master page? I can separate them out as much as possible like the ones with distressing would be different and the ones without sinks could be different.
-
Thanks everyone. I'll make a few changes and see what happens. I'm trying not to over optimize but I still want to do the best with this portion of the SEO as possible.
This is a bit off subject but do any of you know why when I put new content on the site via blog post or new pages I'm not getting a google alert. I've done searches for that page and know google is indexing them but never get the alert. I used to but haven't for a while. Should that be a concern?
Thanks again.
-
Hi Joshua,
I would second the preceding replies and offer this: before you implement your page titles I would recommend three things:
1. Develop a better understanding of keyword research and the difference between broad, phrase and exact match as they relate to long vs short tail keywords.
2. Develop a better understanding of structuring your title with keywords. For example,"<title>Wood Countertops - Butcher Block Counters | by J. Aaron</title>" looks to me more like a breadcrumb than a homepage title. At face value, I would think that title would link to a page about Butcher Block Counters (which is a specific type of wood counter that would have its own page).
3. Wood countertops is a very broad short-tail term - probably very early in the buying cycle and very difficult to hit page 1. If you're a local wood countertop shop, I would optimize locally for immediate results while you build your domain authority so you can rank for these shorter tail terms.
-
Your title tags will appear as a clickable link in the google search results.
That title should clearly describe the contents of the page that the visitor will see upon clicking.
If you do that and have duplicate title tags then there is probably a good justification for combining those pages.
Don't forget to optimize for some kitchen, wood species, photos, colors, etc. terms. The diversity of queries for this type of traffic is enormous.
-
I believe every page should be different so its clear to google that each page hs unique value and belongs in the index - I would think if had to pick which term I want google to show this page for vs the home page and use that as the title and be clear to google this is the page by not using the title again
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
-
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Which is better? One dynamically optimised page, or lots of optimised pages?
For the purpose of simplicity, we have 5 main categories in the site - let's call them A, B, C, D, E. Each of these categories have sub-category pages e.g. A1, A2, A3. The main area of the site consists of these category and sub-category pages. But as each product comes in different woods, it's useful for customers to see all the product that come in a particular wood, e.g. walnut. So many years ago we created 'woods' pages. These pages replicate the categories & sub-categories but only show what is available in that particular wood. And of course - they're optimised much better for that wood. All well and good, until recently, these specialist page seem to have dropped through the floor in Google. Could be temporary, I don't know, and it's only a fortnight - but I'm worried. Now, because the site is dynamic, we could do things differently. We could still have landing pages for each wood, but of spinning off to their own optimised specific wood sub-category page, they could instead link to the primary sub-category page with a ?search filter in the URL. This way, the customer is still getting to see what they want. Which is better? One page per sub-category? Dynamically filtered by search. Or lots of specific sub-category pages? I guess at the heart of this question is? Does having lots of specific sub-category pages lead to a large overlap of duplicate content, and is it better keeping that authority juice on a single page? Even if the URL changes (with a query in the URL) to enable whatever filtering we need to do.
On-Page Optimization | | pulcinella2uk0 -
Page/Website Structure
Hello again Mozzers, We have a category, lets call it widgets. Within widgets are about a hundred or so products. For usability my predecessor made the following layout Widgets Main Cateogry - Links off homepage - (no content just links to the 3 sub-categories)
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
- Widgets by Resolution
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 0.1 Resolution widgets
0.2 resolution widgets
- Widgets by Capacity
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories This was a major improvement from a userbility perspective as it made a very complex product range navigatable by the major features or basic type. However, as you can imaging we now have 60+ very similiar pages all displaying very similiar products a nightmare for SEO. It also isnt ideal for user navigation as it take too many clicks to get to the products. I propose the following fix, and i wanted your opinion. Widget Main Category - Link from homepage (Consolidated with Widgets by Type)
-300 Words of content
-Links to the 12 Sub-type Catoregies (These are pages i can fill with content + products. This would give me a more ordinary structure of which I can focus each page to a keyword) The tricky part comes with incorporating the capacity and resolution options. 1 Browse Capacity Page
(20 sub categories all the same except capacity quantity & products)
1 Browse by Resolution Page
(20 sub categories all the same except resolution value & products) The owner want them, I was going to link from the main widgets page to each of these to give the customer the option. What I can't decide is how to deal with them from an SEO point of view. Should they be no-followed? canonicaled? Can there be any advantage to having so many pages covering slightly different variations or as i suspect it is dangerous to the overall health of the site. To complicate things further, Canonical tags may not be an option due to an old magento version running that doesnt support them. Is there an alternative way around? As always many thanks.0 -
Too many on-page links
Hi, I've apparently got too many on-page links on 79 of my webpages. The majority of these pages are category pages, like this: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-advice/mortgages/... so, what's a person to do? Obviously the page would be useless without the links. Should I just ignore these 'errors'? Or is there something else I should do? I don't want to appear manipulative by labelling them nofollow... Thanks, Amelia
On-Page Optimization | | CommT0 -
Is it better to create more pages of content or expand on current pages of content?
I am assuming that one way of improving the rankings of current pages will be to create more content on the keywords used... should this be an expansion of the content on current pages I am optimising for a keyword or is it better to keep creating new pages and if we are creating new pages is it best to use an extension of the keyword on the new page – for example if we are optimising one page for ‘does voltage optimisation work’ would it then be worth creating a page optimised for ‘does voltage optimisation work in hotels’ for example and so on? I am guessing maybe both might help, this is just a question I have had from one of my clients.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSI1 -
Page Not Indexed
Hi Guys I wrote and published an article last night on my site but it is yet to be indexed. This is strange as articles are usually indexed pretty quickly. Could you have a quick look and see what the problem is? http://www.rankmytri.com/tomtom-running-and-triathlon-watch/ Also all my Blog posts (in the blog section of the site) are not indexed as well (and I dont think they have been for a while) yet I dont have any messages from Google in my webmaster tools. Thoughts? Thanks in advance Ross
On-Page Optimization | | ross88guy0 -
Which page to rank for a Keyword? Home Page or Deep Page?
So, we have a situation where there is one particular keyword we want to rank for. We have been up and down over the years, at our best probably position 4-5, and now at 20ish. Thats for our home page of course, which the majority of our linking is probably pointing at. We also have a sub page which is optimised for that particular service. The term is "web design brisbane".
On-Page Optimization | | MauriceKintek
So as you can imagine, Web Design is in itself a service and we offer others. Should we optimise our home page for it and remove the sub page?
Keep the sub page because its one our services and optimise both?
Do some kind of canonical thing?
Change our interlinking? All our competitors home pages seem to be the ones that rank, and it feels and looks better in results if its the home page, but if switching up to our sub page is better im all ears. Also if our sub page is somehow hurting or leaking SEO from the home page, id like to know as well. Would prefer to not have to provide a link, due to competition but if someone wants to know we can always PM.0 -
Pages not cached
Sorry for all the questions. I have dozens of article pages that are not cached by google. How can I get them cached?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0