Meta title Tag dilemma.... need help

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

Hey, Guys

I have a dilemma that I cannot figure out how to solve. One thing that I have learned is that the meta tag is probably one of the most important factors of SEO. I work in the industry of real estate and we are located in a mid-sized market, Augusta, GA, which does not have  a hugely competitive  digital marketplace. So, I have told my web developer the changes that I want her to make to our major sub-domain pages on our website. I am anticipating that once she makes these changes which will allow me to make the necessary SEO changes to website, that we will see some good results. I have one dilemma that I can't figure out how to solve with the meta title tag.

Check out our rental section: http://aubenrealty.com/rentals.cfm

Now, click on any rental property and it will take you to that rental's page. Notice the page title " Auben Realty- real estate....." This is identical for every active and non-active property on our website. Every time we create a new property, this is what it spits out. Now, take it a step further and click on " Contact me about this property," and you will see the same page title.

My dilemma is, " How do we fix this?"

My assumption is that the best page title would be the address for each property( ex, 1322 Laurel Street, Augusta Ga 30904), right ?

Is this some kind of simple coding adjustment?

[Bromtec]

If you want to have total control over what goes into the title on each and every page, as your developer mentioned, that would definitely require some extra custom programming - can't begin to give a ballpark figure without talking more specifics.

If you're okay with something at least semi-standard across the board that would just include having the actual property address in the title, I can't see that taking more than a couple of hours of programming (if that).

Without looking at the actual source, I'm 99% sure that your property details are already being stored in a database.  With that said, I imagine they can just duplicate the existing header into a new file (i.e. header2.cfm), insert CFM code into the title tag that pulls the property address, and then replace the header file that is currently included in the rentaldetail.cfm page with the new one.

Should you make any global changes in the header in the future, you will need to update both header files.

There's really probably a variety of ways to handle this, but that's my 2 cents.

For whatever it's worth...

I've worked on several real estate websites myself.  They can get rather complicated.  There's definitely a great deal of power in developing your own solution, but it can be costly and time-consuming - you can easily spend $20K for something good.

If you see yourself continuing to need other programming adjustments, it may be easier to jump over to one of the more customizable commercial solutions, such as http://www.diversesolutions.com or http://www.realestatewebmasters.com .  Please note that I'm not trying to bump your developer out of work - they can certainly assist with either of the above solutions, and will likely be necessary for the first one.

Hope that helps -

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

Thanks, Paul

You are correct. Since making this post I was able to speak to our developer and she said that we are not using a popular CMS. It's just something simple that she custom built for us as an attempt to cut down cost for us. The website was built before my time at this company and the original thought was that the website and content would not grow to the point of us needing a CMS because CMS can be expensive. This may not be the case going forward. Our developer said that she will build us a database and figure out a way to give us access to this database so that we will have the ability to tinker with page titles. We feel that this is the best solution.

Here is an email that she sent us:

_....The problem with that is what I explained earlier, your site uses the same header and footer for every page. That's why the title appears on every page the same way._Basically think of it like this....

we have a header and footer, each as one file. So the home page would look like this...

header

homepage content

footer

We do this, so if you make a change to the header or footer, it affects every single page without actually having to update 20 different pages...... So all of your meta tags including the title tag are all located in the header file.

Having said that, to change those out on a page by page basis, it can be done absolutely, but to keep using the header and footer files, it will need to be database driven and changed out based on what page is displaying. I would need to give you guys a place to be able to go in and edit the title tag on each individual page. So it can be done, but as you can see it isn't as easy as just changing some text, some things would need to be programmed to make it happen.....

Please weigh in on this guys. The last thing that I want is for this developer to pull the wool over our eyes.

[Bromtec]

I don't see evidence of a popular CMS being utilized on the page you mentioned, but it does use ColdFusion, which is a scripting language, and I would guess is probably communicating with a database that holds the various details for each property listing.  I don't think it would be too difficult for your developer to pull the address into the title tag.

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

No, it's worth a lot Paul.

Thank you for clearing that point up for me!!!

[Bromtec]

For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to clarify the difference between meta tags and the actual title element.

I've seen a number of cases where people use something like:

or

Please note that Google does not consider the above to be a title element, and will not treat it as so.

You want to make sure your title element looks more like this:

<title>My Page Title</title>

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

Thanks, Guys

Yes, I know. We have to make a lot of changes to make and I am the first person to really take up the SEO baton with this company. I have a lot of work ahead of me as you can tell. The good thing is that these are not hard fixes and I am not in a really competitive market. A lot of the people in this real estate market don't know or care to know anything about SEO. Apparently, the person who set up our website did not know a lot about SEO and stuffed the meta data. I also have the issue of not having access to making these changes. The only person has access to this is our web developer and she does not respond in a speedy fashion. I will ask about which platform we are on. I am pretty sure that we are not on Wordpress.  I am very familiar with Wordpress. I have used Drupul before too. This CMS is very simple and basic. I will find out and hopefully you guys will be able to help me with my dilemma then.

Thanks,

[danatanseo]

Yes, I agree with Chris. Can you tell us what platform you are using for your site. Is it Word Press, Drupal, Joomal?  It sounds like your CMS is automatically concatenating  a title tag for dynamic page queries that include the property specific info. This is one thing that really drives me crazy as an SEO. Without question, whatever platform you are on, you need to be able to, as a site manager, SEO or Webmaster, be able to customize the title, description , canonical and Robots meta tags for every single page on the site. Unfortunately, there are many, even some of the best ones, that won't let you do that.

[csfarnsworth]

Man first of all you need SEO professional from 2013 not from 2010.Things have been changing a lot.

You have crowded your site with lot of keywords. Definitely be in hit list of Keyword stuffing penalty.

Press CTRL+U to see source code of each page.On line 15 onwards you will see meta data.Which CMS you are using right now so that I can guide you accordingly.If its php.you can add custom URL and meta desciption.No keywords please.Kindly share the CMS so that we shall guide you about fix.