Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice
-
Greetings,
Im a new SEO and really knew nothing until signing up to SEOMoz. After reading the SEO101 and gathering as much information in a short period of time things started to become a little clearer.
So I started my first campaign used my new SEO knowledge and input all of my meta information. Then I waited a few days to see what happened with my search result.
We had never ranked for a single keyword before mind you. So a couple/few of days go by and I started punching in my keywords and looking through the pages. There I was page three. I was SO happy.
I read the entire SEO101 again, realized a little more about what I had to do. So I started changing everything up, adding pictures, I found out what a IMG ALT Attributes were in the HTML editor, bolded text and all the other things I missed the first time around.
Three days go by and I move up again. I start to notice my traffic is increasing and I am actually getting organic hits through search traffic. This has never happened before. I am over the moon. But I realize that I have my main focus keyword as the second key word in my title tag. So I switch the two words around, wait a few more days.
Here's why I ask my question. The original title tag was still showing up and I was on the first page for both keywords, and I could see both title tags when searching for either keyword.
So; Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice ?
Warmest regards,
Michael
Warning: adult site, NSFW
-
Testing different titles to see if you can improve your rankings for specific keywords or to focus on different keywords may be worthwhile but changing them for the sake of making a change is pointless.
-
I agree with both Moosa and Aran. I don't think constantly changing your page titles on a site-wide basis is going to help your rankings. It may actually have the opposite effect, depending on how you interpret Google's mysterious and upcoming "Over-Optimization" penalty.
However if you're page title's need improving and doing so will help you increase impressions, I wouldn't avoid it. I just wouldn't make a habit of tweaking them and changing them too often.
Like Aran said, if you've running a special promotion, have a major announcement, incredible new content, etc... I absolutely think changing the titles on relevant pages to reflect those things is a great idea for increasing CTR and conversions.
Moderation is the key on this I believe.
Hope this helps.
Anthony
-
First of all, welcome aboard. I always love to here of peoples first steps into SEO and the results they get.
My site has around 450 pages, thus its would be a major job for me to amend my page titles. Sites like SEOmoz have thousands of pages, and the vast majority of them are available in SERPs. Now as far as I know SEOmoz do not change their titles, again because it would be a massive job.
Saying that, if I run an offer or a sale on my website I will generally change my homepage title to reflect the fact I have a sale on, in the hope that the Sale text will be updated promptly in the SERPs and attarct a few extra click throughs.
In summary, no I dont think the freshness of your page titles has any positive effect on your SEO. But, It may impact your Click through rate (which I guess in turn could effect your SEO...now were going full circle).
Clear as mud?
-
Frequently changing title tag as a good practice… I don’t think so! I mean it’s good to change when you think the changed title can better tell search engine and users about the website but changing it frequently to get SEO boom… I don’t think it works!
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
-
SEO: High intent organic revenue down in Europe
Our team is stumped and we are hoping some of you might have some insight! We are seeing a drop in Europe organic revenue and we can't seem to figure out what the core cause of the problem is. What's interesting, the high intent traffic is increasing across the business, as is organic-attributed revenue. And in Europe specifically, other channels appear to be doing just fine. This seems to be a Europe high-intent SEO problem. What we have established: Revenue was at a peak in Q4 2017 and Q1 2018 Revenue dips in mid-late Q2 2018 and again in Q4 2018 where it has stayed low since Organic traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down, purchases have gone down Paid search traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down slightly, submissions have gone up Currency changes are minimal We cannot find any site load issues What we know happened during this time frame (January 2018 onward): Updates to the website (homepage layout, some text changes) end of April 2018 GDPR end of May 2018 Google Analytics stops being able to track Firefox Europe is a key market for us and we cant figure out what might be causing this to happen - again, only in Europe - beyond GDPR and the changes we've made on our site is there anything else major that we're missing that could be causing this? Or does anyone have any insights as to where we should look? Thank you in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | RS-Marketing0 -
SEO experiments
Hello All, I would appreciate if you could share with me your insight and advise on how to run SEO and UX experiments. How do we set up the proper benchmark and control groups, what tools to use? How can we ensure that the changes we see are not due to other factors and what difference is needed to confirm our findings? Some of the things I would like to test is if certain words in the title tag can correlate with higher CTR or with lower bounce rates. I would also like to quickly test if the common best practices only 1 h1 etc have any effect on rankings at all. Please share with me from knowledge and experience. Thanks Much!
Algorithm Updates | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Best place to employ "branded" related keywords to gain SEO benefits and rank for "non branded" keywords?
Hi all, I want to put this question straight with an example rather than confusing with a scenario. If there is company called "vertigo", a tiles manufacturer. There are many search queries with thousands of searches like "vertigo tiles life", "vertigo tiles for garden", "vertigo tiles dealers", "vertigo tiles for kitchen", etc....These kind of pages will eventually have tendency to rank for non-branded keywords like "tiles for garden", "tiles for kitchen", etc. So where to employ these kind of help/info pages? Main website or sub-domain? Is it Okay to have these pages on sub-domain and traffic getting diverted to sub domain? What if the same pages are on main website? Will main website have ranking improvement for non branded keywords because of employing the landing pages with related topics? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Webmaster Guidelines Change History
Does any one have the dates of changes to Googles Webmaster Guidelines?
Algorithm Updates | | MiroAsh0 -
Should I remove my keyword meta?
So it's safe to assume keywords are no longer used by SEs in the old fashioned sense to rank sites, but should be keep them as indicators of site content? It's been suggested by some that they're detrimental for two reasons: 1. Your competitors can snoop the keywords you're targeting but mainly... 2. Over-optimisation is the enemy these days! Thanks for your input 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | underscorelive0 -
Does Google or Bing use words in the page title beyond the displayed limit for ranking purposes?
Standard good practice for on-page SEO includes keeping page title length below the maximum that Google displays in the SERPs. But words in the title beyond that maximum can be indexed, even if they don't show in the SERPs for end users. For ranking purposes, is there any value in words beyond the character limit in page titles that are truncated in the SERPs?
Algorithm Updates | | KyleJB0 -
50% of my keywords just had a significant drop for no reason no changes?
I just looked at a report for one of my sites in moz pro and Improvement: 35 slots 35/75 keywords just dropped on google, I didn't make any changes recently Ranking Changes Improvement: 12 slots 12 Improved Improvement: 35 slots 35 Declined Many dropping 5 - 22 places! Any ideas on whats up, thank fully it didn't effect traffic, its pretty low anyways, but it has stayed the same... But still dropped to page 5 for lots of stuff. Strange. Did google just update or something? Thanks for any ideas.
Algorithm Updates | | syndicate0 -
Title tag consistency. Is it worth it?
I operate a stain removal website and was wondering how consistent it was worth being from title tag to title tag. To give you an example, here is a group of keyword phrases that I might wish to target: "getting out pet stains with vinegar" "how do I remove water stains from wood" "removing chocolate stains" Does the benefit to be gained (whatever that might be) from making these consistently of the form "how to remove X from Y, " or "how to remove X" outweigh simply giving articles titles based on the exact phrases above? I heard from someone that Google is getting more proficient at spotting "clumsy" title tags, although I'm not sure if any of the above examples would fall into that category, and was thinking that I should then probably proceed on the basis of directly titling articles based on the exact keywords I am uncovering... Any advice much appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | ZakGottlieb710