Title and Url Agreement
-
In the case of trying to hit a wide taxonomy, is it better to keep your title and URL in agreement, or to vary them slightly for exact search matching.
For instance this blog post which has the following url:
http://www.simplifiedbuilding.com/blog/build-your-own-standing-desk/
has the title "Make a Stand Up Desk - Better Working, Longer Living"
The ideas is that build and make are similar words and "stand up" and "standing" are also similar.
So what is the better way to go?
-
Since many studies now see the H1 as having far much less impact (but certainly a bit) I would recommend the following based on anecdotal search index data, "light scientific" studies around H1 impact, the impact of a title for sharing and semantic clustering:
1. Write the page title/H1 with sharing in mind first and search a close second. (given the decreased emphasis on H1s) and the increased weight of sharing.
1B. At this level of detail I would go for the fun "clicky" title for CTR increases.
2. Consider that google (in this day) sees a very clear relationship between 'stand up desk' and "standing desk'. It's just as likely that these variations support each other as much or better than repeating the same term. In your copy, I'd say that even the word "sitting" in (it's very opposition) is related to and supports your "standing" targets.
3. Your URL answers one query while your title/H1 responds to a slightly different query increasing your halo of search reach. At this point I like the semantic cluster rising between your URL and title. And you've got juicy related terms like "working" in the title. This carries through in your content.
4. "Good content" and natural content will have variations on target terms, related terms etc.. thus we can infer perceived content quality to go up (since you're not overly focused on term repetition)
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "varying taxonomy" but variance is much more human and natural than uniformity of every component down the page. But the link below seems relevant although there's tons of great SI articles out there that should also help with your question.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1224698
" text within each node indicates a higher relevance of the materials to the taxonomic classification."
Hope that's of some help.
-
So you're saying that the H1 should "agree" with the keyword density and that would be a better approach.
What about the aspect of varying taxonomy. Does anyone have any thoughts about this?
-
Hi,
I have seen your URl and title according to my suggestion if you are using standing instead of stand up is better for your page optimization because standing word has good keyword density in your page body. It is placed in your content and H1. It is better to use standing word in title also instead of "stand up". you can use "standing desk " as your keyword.
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
-
Include Site Name in Page Titles or not
i would like to ask if it is a good practice or not to Include Site Name in Page Titles. My page is not selling products it is about plagiarism checker tool. i will give one example in one page we are writing about the plagiarism types so the page title is plagiarism types and then is the site name. what is the better practice? Keep it or not? thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | anavasis3 -
Wordpress 'Hide Title' Feature, does this help shorten title length
Im wondering if anyone with some Wordpress experience can help me. I am using Yoast to create my page titles, but yet Moz tells me that my page titles including my actual page title tag which is 'dumfries wedding photography | Hemera Visuals' by clicking on the 'hide title' feature in wordpress will this in turn stop wordpress from automatically adding my page title and therfor bring my title length down drastically? And if so will I have to wait till google next crawls my page to see if this works? Kind Regards Cameron.
On-Page Optimization | | hemeravisuals120 -
Google Indexing Wrong Title
Hey guys ! I have a wordpress website and also yoast seo plugin . I've set up a meta title which is : TV Online | Assistir Filmes| Notícias | Futebol |GogsTV . (I checked on some free tools to see , and they also show up this) but .... google is showing this : GogsTV: TV Online | Assistir Filmes| Notícias | Futebol . Seems they are trying to show my brand name first instead of my main keyword . I'm not sure why it doesnt indexes as i want ... Does anybody know how can i fix this . Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | tiagosimk0 -
Redirects for new site new urls?
If redoing a site and updating some of the url's for SEO should you do permanent redirects for the old sites url's ? Using WordPress. I saw that the Yoast Pro plugin allows you to do this inside WordPress , is this the best way? Suggestions.? I know there are old articles written out on the web pointing back to the what will be soon old url's so just wondering what's the best way to go about this. Thanks Scott
On-Page Optimization | | scott3150 -
Page Title
Hi All, I am wondering if you could help me please. I am getting the following result after I run my On-Page Analysis Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements _Easy fix _ <dl style="font-style: normal;"> <dt>Page titles</dt> <dd>"Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin -" and "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Web pages are meant to have a single title, and for both accessibility and search engine optimization reasons, we strongly recommend following this practice.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove all but a single page title element.</dd> </dl> Does this mean that i have 2 pages that are nearly identical or i should only name a page with one word? The reason i ask is because i have 1 page called "Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin" and another called "Aquashowers-Dublin Shower Repair" I don't have a page called "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin" (with the space inbetween the words and the hyphen) Any help would be great. Thanks again Aidan
On-Page Optimization | | aidanlawlor0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi Guys, First off, it's an honour to be a part of this awesome community. I'm using WordPress and getting top 3 rankings for great keywords and I'm very excited, however my page titles are in this format "keyword optimised title here - site name here" eg: "This is my keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is another keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is a longtail keyword - this is the name of my blog" SEOMoz is reporting errors because of duplicate page title tags due to the "this is the name of my blog" being in every page title. Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks in advance and keep up the great work! Cheers, Troy.
On-Page Optimization | | TroyDean710 -
The URL Inside
Howdy SEO'ers, I have a quick question for the SEO gurus out there. When constructing "better" search friendly URLs would one of these be better than the other? Example 1: http://Domain.com/Category/Sub-Category/Product-name Example 2: http://Category.Domain.com/Sub-Category/Product-name In this example the category could be phones and the sub-category brands of phones. Is either one of these URLs "better" than the other in terms of ranking? Thanks! I'll hang-up and listen to your answer. 🙂 Jonathan
On-Page Optimization | | creativedepartment0 -
Duplicate product urls
Our site automatically creates shorter urls for the products. There is a rel canonical tag in place, but webmaster tools shows these urls have duplicate title tags. Here is an example: http://www.colemanfurniture.com/holden-desk.htm http://www.colemanfurniture.com/writing-desks-secretary-desks/holden-desk.htm Should the longer url be redirected to the shorter one?
On-Page Optimization | | thappe0