Page Title
-
My website was hacked last November and then again last week. Prior to the hacking we were at number one in Google.co.uk for our main search term "nile cruises' for years.
After last November's hacking we dropped to about position 4 and after last week we are at position 7.
Ima rebuilding the lost data and I am having to create new Title and Description meta data for each of the indexed pages.
I am taking the opportunity to try and ensure my titles and descriptions are good and the correct length, etc but wondered about the best title format.
I set our home page title over the weekend as:
Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist
I was going to try and cover 3 keyphrases in the title like this:
Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains
But I thought that might look a bit spammy because the 3 phrases are very similar.
I wondered what anyone else might suggest?
Thanks,
Colin
-
I agree Nathan. Thanks.
I'm going to take Marcus's and your advice with the title.
Cheers,
Colin
-
Thanks Marcus. I'm hoping that that's the case.
The annoying thing si that "information-wise" we are a much better site. We have Blog posts and information going back to 2007 and much more content but that site still ranks above us at the moment.
However I intend to fight the good fight as you say. I think membership of SEOMoz is going to be a great help especially when you can call upon the kindness of people like yourself to share their knowledge.
Thanks,
Colin
-
HI Colin,
I agree with Marcus's response below. Getting all the keywords in the title tags and not sounding spammy can be tough, especially when dealing with the home page since that page can sometimes be the catch all page.
From what I have been told it does not benefit you to repeat the same word more than once like you do in this example.............Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains. By repeating Nile 3 times you are missing out on being able to include other keywords.
His example is a great example - Nile Cruises & Cruise Bargains - UK ABTA & ATOL Cruise Specialist
It includes a different variation of each (singular or plural)
-
Hey, I would question the quality of that competitors links if they suddenly got 6000 and currently opensiteexplorer and such don't really account for quality so just keep fighting the good fight and try to create a better and more informative site than your competitor.
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for that advice and your suggestions. Hopefully (in some way) the drop might be a result of the Google changes and perhaps with hard SEO work I can regain our lost position.
One of our competitors seemed to appear from nowhere last November with about 6,000+ links which dwarfs our back link total. So I think it will be hard to overtake them very quickly but perhaps on-page and content improvements will help us compete.
We do have a WP blog on the site but the main site is built on Cold Fusion.
Colub
-
Hey Colin, I much prefer a good branded or descriptive title so this:
Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist
Is way better than this: Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains
If you wanted to cover those phrases or words you could always try to work them in to the title in a more natural way say something like.
Nile Cruises & Cruise Bargains - UK ABTA & ATOL Cruise Specialist
That is a super quick example but it works in many more of the words and phrases in a non spammy way. Sure you could do better!
Also, with all the changes in search of late (penguin, panda etc) then don't assume the hack was the loss of your rankings, it could be the natural moving target nature of search or one of many other causes. By the way, what are you using that is getting hacked so often? WordPress? There are options to easily toughen it up and just going that little step extra is usually enough to put off most 'hackers'.
Hope this helps
Marcus
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
-
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 -
My company's product is referred to by two different names (SVN and Subversion). When cleaning up our Title tags, is it OK to use either name to keep the title tags around 70 characters?
I am cleaning up title tags that are too long or not correct. In our title tag we reference our product (a version of OSS source code). This product is often referred to as both SVN or Subversion. When writing Title tags is it OK to use one or the other depending on the length of the Title Tag? For instance: Contact Us | Free SVN & Git Hosting | Bug & Issue tracking | CloudForge vs **About CloudForge | Free Subversion & Git Hosting | Bug Tracking ** | |
On-Page Optimization | | CollabNet0 -
Home page keyword effecting internal page ranking
Hello, My client has a second keyword for the home page that is competitive. The home page is not being ranked for this keyword. Instead, an internal category page is ranking. This internal category page is more relevant than the home page - it shows the categories for the actual products that this term refers to. But everyone around us in Google's page results has far more backlinks than the internal page, and we're all heavily optimized for this term. My question is, is it safe to pull the second term off of the home page or is this internal page strong because it is somehow being strengthened by the home page optimization?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Several Links in Some Pages
Dear all, Our main site is a bussiness directory, and following some SEO advices, we are creating landing pages for each category, in order to optimize them for the keywords. Those landing pages have links to the listings related to them. Using the same idea, we have created pages related to the regions, and those pages include links to the listings located in them. The only problem that I see with that, is the number of links that some categories or regions could have. Is there a limit of recomended number of links per page, from a SEO perspective? We also have a main category page, that includes a list of all categories, and this page could also have a relatively high number of links. The pages have around 300 to 500 words, some include also images, some include videos. Many thanks for your help, Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | te_c0 -
Website title question
Say you have a website url of a rather competitive keyword phrase, would it be beneficial for me to go ahead and name my site title the same as the url? And also should my site title go through every page, or should i consider having slight variations throughout the pages? for example: page title | site title or page title| slight varation of title on sub page? **edit - to further expand on the question a bit also, if my google places has the company name on _there - would it be effective to go ahead and use the company name in my site title? _ _Also if i have the main keyword in the breadcrumb as the home, does that effect my SEO credibility if it shows up on all the pages? _
On-Page Optimization | | tgr0ss0 -
Fixed horrible title tag on home page, and lost ranking. Will it come back?
I was helping out someone on their site and its home page ranked on page 2 for their term, and the title tag was horrible. It was 160 characters long with lots of near repetitive keywords ([keyword] - adjective [keyword] - adjective [keyword] - adjective [keyword] etc.) -- typical title that Google would penalize when it got around to it. So I created a title that made sense, for the keyword, and that followed the best practices of Google recommendations. Now it's dropped off the index. (EDIT: sorry, still in index, just not even in top 1000) Is this something I should not have done? I was just trying to keep them from getting slammed. And, how long should I expect it to take to get my ranking back? This is the only page title I changed.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
Why there's a full-stop in the title of SEOMOZ's home page?
Hello, I see there's a full-stop (.) in the title of SEOMOZ's home page. Why is it so? Regards
On-Page Optimization | | IM_Learner0 -
Would I be safe canonicalizing comments pages on the first page?
We are building comment pages for an article site that live on a separate URL from the article (I know this is not ideal, but it is necessary). Each comments page will have a summary of the article at the top. Would I be safe using the first page of comments as the canonical URL for all subsequent comment pages? Or could I get away with using the actual article page as the canonical URL for all comment pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BostonWright0