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I have waited plenty of time.  Google has cached several pages with the updated title placed in the <title>tags.<br /><br />However search results, continue to show otherwise.<br /><br />I read the following (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en)</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.</em></p> <p>The reason I want to change my title, is because there seems to be a relevancy issue (as pointed out my other community members here.)  Google is having trouble recognizing understanding what our site is about.<br /><br />So instead of a title that reads, "Felix And Fingers: Dueling Pianos" (as Google continues to use) I prefer "Dueling Pianos - Felix And Fingers"<em> </em> I don't believe Google is recognizing us correctly as a dueling piano company.<em><br /></em>Google doesn't seem to like that.  Any idea why or how I might go about getting this updated?</p></title>

My website has roughly 1000-2000 pages.  However, our homepage is lacking relevancy as to what it is about.

One way that I'd like to tackle this problem, is by updating many of our pages with internal linking.

I often hear, use exact keyword links with caution, but have assumed this mainly referred to external backlinks.

Would it be a disaster to set up our single most relevant keyword on about 300 pages and point it to our homepage?

There are breadcrumbs on our site, but the home link uses an image (It's a picture of a house, if you're curious.)  Am I better off just to change that to our most relevant keyword?

I could use any advice on internal links for establishing better homepage relevancy.

Thank you!

Great information!  Thanks!  I will act on this and make some progress.

I can't believe our h1 tag (all this time) has been seen as one word FingersDueling Pianos!

If the majority of URLs have no logic, then it makes things a bit tricky in regards to minimizing the amount of work.

I once had a very active and large website with about 500-1000 single lines of rewrite code (1 for each URL) in my htaccess.  Surprisingly, it did not slow the server down at any noticeable rate, unless you are very sensitive to milliseconds and even then, one trial to the next could easily differ from regular internet congestion.  My point is, nobody ever noticed.

Here's a few ways that I would handle this job to get through it as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

The more aggressive and time consuming approach:
I would output all the URLs that were changed from phpmyadmin or whatever mysql administration tool you might use to a spreadsheet.  From that spreadsheet, I would add the original URL.
Then with the old URL (A1) and new URL (A2)  I would write a formula to output the correct rewrite (A3.)  Then simply copy and paste that formula down all the rows that it applies to.  You might need to break up the URLs to grab the right pieces for your formula.

Of course use, regex where you can, and keep your .htaccess rewrites to a minimum.

If that is still too much work, hire someone to do it through elance.com

The somewhat sloppy pace-yourself-approach:

Another approach you could take is to just monitor google webmaster tools for all the page not found errors.  And once a day or once a week, grab those URLS, create the rewrite, and mark it as fixed in webmaster tools.

The reason I say this is somewhat sloppy is because, you might find that you could have used regex in a lot of instances to better handle all those missing URLs.

But it may be a good way of staying on track with google, and handling the issues only as they arise so it does not feel like such a mammoth task.

Thank you very much for taking the time to look into this.  I appreciate your answer very much.  Improving our city and state pages has been on our "to-do" list for a while now.  So that will likely get a nice bump up on the priority list.

I feel confident that we can and ARE performing better overall than our competitors.  We have more content, and traffic comping from a wider variety of keywords.

But it was the homepage performance that has been perplexing to me.  It is somewhat of a splash page limited in content.  But many of our competitors have a similar homepage.

I do understand that if you add air to the floats, it raises the entire ship (that's the only analogy I have at the moment) so by improving our city and state pages, I suspect there would be some effect as well for our homepage with the main and most relevant keyword.

But are there any other suggestions or explanations as to how we can rank better with our homepage on that particular keyword.  Or why some of our competitors who aren't doing a very good job, are managing to outrank us with that keyword and their homepage?

Thank you everyone. Here is the URL: http://bit.ly/1PeSIo4

Laura, when I said local, I was referring to local organic results.  Sorry for not being clear on that.

I feel that the most relevant keyword is dueling pianos, as that is what are business is.

Calin, thank you for that information.  Of course, now that I clarified that I meant google local organic results, it maybe change things a bit.

Although our domain name does not include our keyword, I remember an article of Matt Cutts saying that this would not matter, and even that some sites would be penalized for exact match penalties.  Also, I do use schema markup, which I have verified in webmaster tools.

We have a map page, as well.  We started using Yext, recently, as a "wallpaper" service more than anything else, to establish quick and easy consistency with our website, and google+.

I appreciate any additional advice. And will certainly go through all the advice that has so far been presented.  Thank you!

2000+ is a lot of URLs to work through.  But you can most likely get through them quickly with a few good regular expression 301 redirects in your .htaccess

If you have a pretty consistent form from the old url to the new one, this will be a piece of cake.

ex:
old URL: this/was/cool

new URL: this/is/cool

However, if there is really no rhyme and reason to the newly formed URLs, this could end up taking a considerate amount of time.

I would look into writing 301 redirects with regular expressions in .htaccess  (I'm assuming your server is  and uses .htaccess)

There are a number of resources for doing this, and even one here at moz.com
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

In regards to local search with the most relevant keyword, I can't seem to get ahead of the competition.

I've been going through a number of analytics reports, and in analyzing our trophy keyword (which is also the most relevant, to our service and site) our domain has consistently been better with a number of factors.  There is not a moz report that I can find that doesn't present us as the winner.

Of course I know MOZ analytics and google analytics are different, but I'm certain that we have them beat with both.

When all metrics seem to be in our favor, why might other competitors continue to have better success?

We should be dominating this niche industry.  Instead, I see a company using blackhat seo, another with just a facebook page only, and several others that just don't manage their site or ever add unique, helpful content.

What does it take to get ahead?  I'm pretty certain I've been doing everything right, and doing everything better than our local competitors.

I think google just has a very imperfect algorythm, and the answer is "a tremendous amount of patience" until they manage to get things right.

I'm new to Moz.  Just set up my trial campaign, and it had suggested many keywords.  Many of the phrases that were suggested do not contain prepositions.

For example, instead of something like "sporting good stores in Chicago" it suggested "sporting good stores Chicago"

Today, I looked at the on-page optimization suggestions, which are (of course) suggesting that I remove prepositions from my page to rank well.

Well, as you know, that is unnatural to the reader.  But I suspect people are searching in higher volume, leaving the prepositions out.  I know that if I were to search for a sporting goods store in Chicago, I would probably leave out "in."

What should I do?  Should I remove all the suggested keywords, and make them readable (which people are less like using in their search?)  Do I go back to all my pages and try to optimize it for a keyword that is natural, but does not include a preposition (such as Chicago sporting goods stores) or should I be doing something else?

I redesigned one specific page out of thousands on my site.  I believe I made it better, giving it more content, and a better organized design.  It spiked for a day, and then it dropped back to oblivion.  I don't know where it is with Google right now.

From what I've read, it takes Google some time to understand the new design, so this is perhaps, normal.  But it still makes me uncomfortable.

Is there anything I can do in the meantime to help this redesigned page?  Or if I should just leave it alone for a while, how long should I have to wait to let it sink in with Google?

If the majority of URLs have no logic, then it makes things a bit tricky in regards to minimizing the amount of work.

I once had a very active and large website with about 500-1000 single lines of rewrite code (1 for each URL) in my htaccess.  Surprisingly, it did not slow the server down at any noticeable rate, unless you are very sensitive to milliseconds and even then, one trial to the next could easily differ from regular internet congestion.  My point is, nobody ever noticed.

Here's a few ways that I would handle this job to get through it as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

The more aggressive and time consuming approach:
I would output all the URLs that were changed from phpmyadmin or whatever mysql administration tool you might use to a spreadsheet.  From that spreadsheet, I would add the original URL.
Then with the old URL (A1) and new URL (A2)  I would write a formula to output the correct rewrite (A3.)  Then simply copy and paste that formula down all the rows that it applies to.  You might need to break up the URLs to grab the right pieces for your formula.

Of course use, regex where you can, and keep your .htaccess rewrites to a minimum.

If that is still too much work, hire someone to do it through elance.com

The somewhat sloppy pace-yourself-approach:

Another approach you could take is to just monitor google webmaster tools for all the page not found errors.  And once a day or once a week, grab those URLS, create the rewrite, and mark it as fixed in webmaster tools.

The reason I say this is somewhat sloppy is because, you might find that you could have used regex in a lot of instances to better handle all those missing URLs.

But it may be a good way of staying on track with google, and handling the issues only as they arise so it does not feel like such a mammoth task.

Thank you everyone. Here is the URL: http://bit.ly/1PeSIo4

Laura, when I said local, I was referring to local organic results.  Sorry for not being clear on that.

I feel that the most relevant keyword is dueling pianos, as that is what are business is.

Calin, thank you for that information.  Of course, now that I clarified that I meant google local organic results, it maybe change things a bit.

Although our domain name does not include our keyword, I remember an article of Matt Cutts saying that this would not matter, and even that some sites would be penalized for exact match penalties.  Also, I do use schema markup, which I have verified in webmaster tools.

We have a map page, as well.  We started using Yext, recently, as a "wallpaper" service more than anything else, to establish quick and easy consistency with our website, and google+.

I appreciate any additional advice. And will certainly go through all the advice that has so far been presented.  Thank you!

I'm new to Moz.  Just set up my trial campaign, and it had suggested many keywords.  Many of the phrases that were suggested do not contain prepositions.

For example, instead of something like "sporting good stores in Chicago" it suggested "sporting good stores Chicago"

Today, I looked at the on-page optimization suggestions, which are (of course) suggesting that I remove prepositions from my page to rank well.

Well, as you know, that is unnatural to the reader.  But I suspect people are searching in higher volume, leaving the prepositions out.  I know that if I were to search for a sporting goods store in Chicago, I would probably leave out "in."

What should I do?  Should I remove all the suggested keywords, and make them readable (which people are less like using in their search?)  Do I go back to all my pages and try to optimize it for a keyword that is natural, but does not include a preposition (such as Chicago sporting goods stores) or should I be doing something else?

Thank you very much for taking the time to look into this.  I appreciate your answer very much.  Improving our city and state pages has been on our "to-do" list for a while now.  So that will likely get a nice bump up on the priority list.

I feel confident that we can and ARE performing better overall than our competitors.  We have more content, and traffic comping from a wider variety of keywords.

But it was the homepage performance that has been perplexing to me.  It is somewhat of a splash page limited in content.  But many of our competitors have a similar homepage.

I do understand that if you add air to the floats, it raises the entire ship (that's the only analogy I have at the moment) so by improving our city and state pages, I suspect there would be some effect as well for our homepage with the main and most relevant keyword.

But are there any other suggestions or explanations as to how we can rank better with our homepage on that particular keyword.  Or why some of our competitors who aren't doing a very good job, are managing to outrank us with that keyword and their homepage?