Will changing the title tags cause me to lose rankings?
-
I have a site that gets pretty decent rankings. Based on Seomoz's assessment of my site I have ALOT of title tags that are too long.
If I make modifications to my title tags will that hurt my rankings?
I am also thinking of removing my company name from the title tag as that is taking up too much space.
-
HI Doug,
Thank you for your input a while back! Wanted to see if you could give me some insite on best practice for this........
On this site http://www.austintenantadvisors.com/ I have my main landing pages listed in the navigation under "Types". The reason why I did this is because I am not sure where to put those on the home page where it does not look spammy to Google and looks natural for users. Obviously they need to appear someone on the home page for Google to be able to crawl and index them.
Your thoughts?
-
I think this looks WAY better than your other one. I'll give you a thumbs up because you're learning.
-
Thanks guys for all your feedback and suggestions. I think I have decided on this one for the home page.
Austin TX Office Space & Commercial Real Estate. Find Rental Listings
Thoughts?
-
Thanks for that Francisco. Luckily my landing pages rank as well as my home page and each has good content.. Just been trying to figure out the best Title for the home page. I like what you suggested.
-
Completely agree with Francisco. The problem with home pages is that people try and make them mean something to everyone - and they end up not meaning very much at all.
Home pages are usually your brand landing page - it's the best place for people trying to find out about your company.
For someone searching for a keyword specific to one of your offers - a specific landing page is definitely the way to go. You can make the pages extremely relevant to the search term, the user intent and your specific offering. Think of the benefits to the user when they're landing on the very best page to answer their query.
-
You're over analyzing this. If your home page is the only page that ranks, you have problems. My website has 28% of incoming visits to the home page. 71% is to the landing pages.
BUILD highly relevant landing pages and write KICK ASS content for those landing pages.
This to me looks spammy: Austin Office Space For Lease | Austin Commercial Real Estate Properties | Retail Space For Rent | Austin Tenant Advisors
Obviously you are trying to keyword stuff.
I would write something clickable like this: Office Space for Rent in Austin for Commercial & Retail. Get Rates.
-
Thanks Doug. I totally agree with that however doing title tags for the home page is tough because that is the catch all right? From the home page I have links to more specific landing pages (e.g office space, retail space, etc...)
What is best practice for the home page title tags?
-
Are all these things equivalent? If someone was searching for office space, would they be interested in retail space?
Would there be any advantage using two separate pages targeting these two audiences each addressing the specific needs, and concerns specific to that type of customer?
Pages tend to be less engaging/appealing when there's a broad scope and generic content.
-
Then start building quality links with anchor text include "Lease, Properties, Rent, Retail" in them.
-
I really don't worry about it that much. I recommend to just do what is best for your customer and focus on conversions.
I literally copied and pasted from the SERP one of my pages. This is for the KW phrase "Ship car to Germany".
Shipping Car to Germany from USA - Save money shipping autos to ...
<cite>www.shipoverseas.com/us/ship-car/.../shipping-car-to-germany.html</cite>Shipping car to Germany from USA. Departure & Arrival Ports, Documents, Duty Tax. We ship cars for private individuals, active US military,and tourists.Notice that the keyword "Ship" is not in the title, but the related KW "Shipping" is. If I change the title tag to "Ship Car to Germany", then my rankings may be affected a little, but that's going to depend on where the competitors rank in Google's algorithm too. Now that I look at this, I have to change my title tag and description because I have better content on my page.
-
Thank you for the response. The challenge I have in adding my company name is that its 3 words and takes up space.......leaving less space for #1 and #2 keywords.
How do you suggest I handle that? I guess if Austin was the first keyword I could just have Tenant Advisors in the very end.
For example -
My current title tag: Austin Office Space For Lease | Austin Commercial Real Estate Properties | Retail Space For Rent | Austin Tenant Advisors
I could use this instead? Austin Office Space & Commercial Real Estate Tenant Advisors
If I do that then I'm leaving out Lease, Properties, Rent, Retail
-
Do you have your company name in the title also? Ive been reading it's important however in my industry people don't typically search by brand name......they search for exactly what they are looking for.
Did your rankings go down a little first? I have been told that I may experience decreased rankings for a few weeks.
-
That was a great post by Rand. Thanks for sharing.
Because my company name has 3 words it takes up a lot of characters. That is why I'm having a hard time squeezing it in and may just leave out. Besides when someone searches for my services they don't look up my company name they typically look up a keyword.
Also, what has been your experience about rankings and changing title tags? Should I expect them to go down for a few weeks?
-
Remember to consider that it's not just rankings, but also about getting click-through from the SERPS.
Searchers have got to feel that they are going to find what they're looking for when they look at your entry in the search results. I agree with Francisco that it's good to have a call to action in your title tag if you can (but it's not always applicable for every type of page), but also consider if you can get a benefit in there too - what's in it for me if I click on this entry...
In my experience long title tags tend to be less compelling than shorter ones, and can be compromised entirely if they're being cut-off.
Long title tags can also make it more complicated for people to share your content on social sites and even email. We've all experienced URLs that get broken when long lines get word-wrapped in email!
Your Brand or company name can be an important trust signal that may affect the attractiveness of your SERPS entry to searchers. You need to consider the search intent, and the standing of your company/brand in the market or niche your in.
You may find that it's not quite as black and white as {company name} {keyword} or visa-versa. You may want to have your company name in some titles and not others depending on the content and target audience (and their level of awareness of your products/services.
The only way to know for sure is to test. People are funny things and while you can try and make well informed decisions there can always be unforeseen consequences. Keep track of the changes you make, and measure the effect.
Good luck!
-
Make sure you watch the part where Rand talks about over optimizing your title tag. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday
Here is my rule and I think EVERYONE should remember it. 1st word in the title is the most important. 2nd word is the 2nd most important. The last word in the title tag is the least important. Anything above 65 character is wasting time. Make your title tag enticing enough that people want to click it. Put your keyword and a call to action.
-
I had a bunch of title tags that were too long and I shortened all of them to be close to the max. My ranks all went up higher over a 2-4 week period. I just made sure all the important key words remained in the title.
-
if you focus on your main keywords, then it shouldn't be an issue, but keep in mind some listings will possibly change.
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
-
Product Tags
So Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, this are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price. Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.
On-Page Optimization | | moon-boots0 -
Title tag of product page including category keyword?
I'm doing some work on a site that essentially is about giving and getting reviews. It's heirarchy has categories and products within those categories. For the title tag of the product pages, they currently have "Best {Category} | {Product} Reviews" I've advised them that they should remove the "Best {Category}" part because a) they're already targeting the category pages themselves and b) from a user perspective, the product page should just have a title tag that makes sense for that particular page (the page is not necessarily the "best" and certainly is not a series of products within that category). I wanted to post here to confirm that my advice is sound. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | jim_shook0 -
Ranking Oddities
In my local marketplace, I have competitors who have the following: unoptimized title tags and description tags (really long using keyword stuffing), stuffing keywords into the Meta keywords tag, lacking keywords in the body copy, using spammy footers or sections of text with a lot of local cities listed where no physical business is located, unattractive design (in my humble opinion), lower page authority, lower domain authority, lower number of back links and are organically outranking my site that I have tried to optimize using the MOZ tools, Market Samurai, other tools, and other great advice provided by people much more knowledgeable than myself about SEO. I don't understand how these sites that lack SEO continue to rank in the #1 or #2 spots in Google for my main keyword phrase + location, while my site is either not in the top 50 or in the top 40s range. How is it that sites with little to no optimization, no blogs, and very few backlinks, continue to rank quite well? These are not all new sites. Domain ages range from 1 to 10 years. What I am seeing appears to go against the grain of SEO recommendations. Any general thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | ajgrossman1 -
Properly changing title, URL and content for new keywords without harming other rankings.
Hello - We are looking to try to bring up some keywords in the SERPs that we are currently ranking fairly low for. We sell Christening clothing for children and people will use both Christening and Baptism to search for the same thing. We currently rank very high for Christening (#1 on Google for certain combinations) but we are fairly low on Baptism.
On-Page Optimization | | BabyBeauBelle
I am trying to figure out the best way to start getting Baptism up by changing some title, URL and content pages to include more Baptism keywords. My concern is messing with the existing because we rank so well for Christening. Since we are ecommerce we can vary this quite a bit on our products, but again I'm nervous to do so fearing changing the wrong things, too many products etc and in the process of trying to raise one set of keywords (baptism) we harm the other set (christening).
Any advice would be appreciated!0 -
Site Wide Title Tag Discussion
Do you think it's good to have an instance of your primary keyword occur on most of your site's title tags throughout your site? Or do you think having the keyword occur in most title tags throughout the site will dilute the ranking ability for the home page? I haven't read much about this in "best practices" for title tags. hmmmm...
On-Page Optimization | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Will deleting excess self serving links from old posts damage established ranking
My SEOmoz report showed many posts with "too many links." I can easily go back into wordpress and delete self serving links. But is there a downside to this if these posts are already ranked well on google search for the desired key words? Or will deleting the excess self serving links improve ranking
On-Page Optimization | | wianno1680 -
Duplicate Page Titles?
I'm running a campaign report within SEOmoz & am getting 9 pages that appear on this report. They all happen to be our author pages www.example.com//author/admin We have multiple authors. Is there a proper way that I should take care of this? Also as a side note, I'm using Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, is there a setting on their I should change that will fix this issue? Or is it an issue at all? Thanks, BJ
On-Page Optimization | | seointern0 -
Best title tag structure?
Hi, In the below example, which one do you think would work best if any. The website is called greatshoes.co.uk (fictitious) The category is 'work shoes' and a page under this cat is lets say 'Size 9 work shoes' I tend to build my title tags like this: size 9 work shoes, cheap size 9 work shoes | greatshoes.co.uk BUT I have read on here it should be more like this: size 9 work shoes < work shoes | greatshoes.co.uk Does anyone think it would make a difference when targeting for the term 'size 9 work shoes' which title tag I use. Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0