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March 22, 2006

The Latest and Greatest Search Engine Friendly Page Titles

The seemingly very basic topic of web page Titles comes up very often in discussion about Search Engine Optimization. One reason for this being that the performance of the title has always been something fairly easy to measure. For a while, it was prudent to uses dashes and avoid commas at all costs. Commas were an indicator of keyword stuffing that set off an alarm in the search algorithm; it was widely speculated from analysis of results. Yet, I have seen many top ten Google search results recently with commas.

A thread posted this morning at Search Engine Watch asks about suggested character limitations, the avoidance of so-called "stop words" (and, or,the, where, etc...), and using commas. A quick response from Danny Sullivan summarizes the recent accepted method of building an effective Title. Every SEO will have variations on the subject, and some may want to consider various search engines and how they treat Title structure slightly differently as well. Ironically, when looking for such a variety of opinions, I checked High Rankings Forum and voila! A thread started just yesterday on the same subject.

Both threads should draw some interesting opinions about web page Titles, and can be found at Search Engine Watch Forums and High Rankings Forums.



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posted chrisboggs in Search Engine Optimization at March 22, 2006 9:54 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

The element is not a meta data. See "The global structure of an HTML document" on the W3C website ;)

 

Posted by Sebastien Billard at March 22, 2006 10:44

I think the most alarming thing about the whole post is that "keyword stuffing" has its own Wiki entry.

 

Posted by Erik at March 22, 2006 11:12

Agreed Sebastian. Much like when people call ALT Attributes "ALT tags." Will correct. Thanks for the reminder. :)

 

Posted by Chris Boggs at March 22, 2006 12:48

The problem with long keyword stuffed titles is they can hurt your CTR. It looks real bad when a site has a long title that maxes out the limit and goes to a ...

Maybe on a spam site this works but it looks very bad on a professional site. People spend way to much time trying to get all their SE traffic to their front page. You will have a better chance if you make a page for each phrase.

Also what I see is some PR5 website that puts a bunch of really tough terms in the title. They are never ever going to rank for those terms. Put stuff on your front page title that you can actually rank for and also get people to click on it. If you put something in your title and you don't even rank in the top 1000 change it. Don't waste your highest ranking page with something that will never happen.

Most people will never rank for those big terms. I have seen people work on a term for a year and give up when they could have made a lot of money on lesser terms.

 

Posted by David Ogletree at March 23, 2006 11:29

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