Optimized page titles post penguin

[Peter264]

Just a quick question to hear a few opinions on page titles in a post penguin/panda world.

For example, we are working on a large downloads portal that offers Addons for games called FSX and FS2004... Page titles are currently as follows:

Concorde for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
Quants Airbus A380 for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads

I thought it would be beneficial to remove the boilerplate "Civil Aircraft Downloads" to stop the template effect in the titles. Yay or nay? Good idea or bad idea? Other ideas?

Also, after removing that the titles would be as follows:

British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX

We still will have "for FSX" boiler plate text...is this okay? Perhaps we should remove the "for" and just have the title as "FSX Concorde" or "Concorde FSX" -what do you guys think?

Are there any other title suggestions you guys can recommend?

Your thoughts, tips and suggestions are very much appreciated.

[RobertFisher]

Peter,

Are you saying that every product is an FSX Addon?

If so, then you are going to need to think this through and really get clear on Keyword research. Other keywords that get a ton of queries are FSX as a stand alone, FSX Simulator, etc. Also, FSX Download might be a clever one for those where there is a direct download as many who buy software do not wish to wait.

So, my thought is this: You could make it start with the FSX piece: FSX Download, FSX Missions, FSX Aircraft, FSX Addon PIPE the specific aircraft  PIPE then your Brand Name.

So:  FSX AddOn | Boeing 747 British Airways | Your Brand

I think this will help you and as long as your content is unique (so dont have 90% of FSX Addon on the page and 10% on the plane). There are ways to avoid duplicating the content by potentially using Categories then make the product the individual aircraft download. I would need to see more of the site and think it through to be clear on resolution. 
Hope this bit helps,

[SEODinosaur]

Lets say you wanted to rank for "blue cat" having your page set up like this:

URL: http://www.brand.com/blue-cat

Page Title:blue cat

H1:blue cat

body: blue cat

link on page: blue cat

This is considered over optimizing

Having your page set up like this:

URL: http://www.brand.com/blue-cat

Page Title:blue cat from the Brand

H1:Welcome to blue cat - where we painted our cat blue.

body: the blue cat has many friends and smells like paint. lorem ipsum etc. etc.

link on page: learn more about the blue cat

This is a page that uses diversity and still includes your main keyword phrase. This is how you protect your site prom the over optimizing.

[PerfectPitchConcepts]

This overall was a great question and removes a bit of anxiety I'd been having. However, Donnie I have a followup - can you please elaborate on not using the exact keyword? Do you mean like "cat" in the url, "cats" in the title, "felines" in the H1... ?

[Peter264]

Thank you for your replies guys.

So from your comments, I'm under the impression that it's OK to use boilerplate text that is not the company/brand name in titles. I mean, if I was to use "FSX Addon Boeing 747" then we would have over 20,000 pages with "FSX Addon" at the start of the title tag...that's okay?

From research and reading, I was under the impression to steer away from templating in a post panda/penguin world...not just in page content but titles too.

Ler me know your thoughts!

[SEODinosaur]

I like to think from a users perspective. When you type something into Google many times you will click on the title that shows exactly or close to the exact thing you were looking for.

SEOmoz report card recommends that you place your keyword as close to the beginning of the title. However do not use exact keyword in your URL/title/H1/Body, use diversity.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

SEO-wise: have your keyword in the first position in the title

Aside from that you want to encourage a high CTR with a title that describes the page and entices a click. If you have room for a brand name boiler plate, I like to add it. I only remove it if the title is too long and would get cut off in SERPs.

[RobertFisher]

The first thing you should be looking at is what is the query? In  other words what are the searched on Keywords for these items. Since FSX is an add on for flight simulation, what do people who are looking for it search for?

If they search for FSX addons and the type (Boeing 747) and your company is Super FSX Addons, I would follow the suggested convention of FSX Add on Boeing 747 | Super FSX Addons.

So, the keyword is first in the title tag, separated by a PIPE (straight up line) and then the Brand.

Be sure you take a look though and know what the important keywords are and don't just assume you know because you sell this all the time. You may be surprised,

Good luck.