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Re: Good page titles - friendly SEO

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From: Steven Henderson
Date: Jan 20, 2010 5:00AM

I think I have read the same article, Simius.

In principal I agree with the methods discussed, but in the case of the
following listing for 'womens clothing london', how is a business to compete
on equal application of the page title if they appear in the top 5 SERPs
with equal SEM and SEO?

1. womens clothing in street in London, girlie shop
2. The Lady in a hat, Street in London
3. Burtons | Women's Clothing, Street in London
4. Clothing > Women | Next, Street in London
5. Anne Summers

The above is how a typical SERP listing could look without the clutter of
meta descriptions or other data ... not really useful if the value of brands
is taken out of the equation. Often a high ranking page's title is just the
brand name, so serves little value as a functional title. That said, when
one sees so many equally ranking and descriptive SERPs, choosing one over
another is even more problematic.

In the magazine world, people either look for a known brand and pick it up,
or are attracted to something that stands out from the crowd. Why is it that
the SERP titles are being hyped to be a particular way, when in practice,
when everyone does it nobody actually stands out? Shouldn't a good title in
fact 'STAND OUT', particularly where brand is not an attractive keyword?
Therefore making it simply difficult to keep up with the competition, thus
most people are sucking up the over-crowded consensus of what a title should
be? Rather than actively keeping it competitive, perhaps for the fear that
it will not rank as highly?

Maybe I am just seeing too much into something that is perhaps unimportant?
Although if we agree that a page title isn't accountable for the SERP rank,
then perhaps once a page has a good rank we must then make efforts to ensure
that the title stands out? Thus begging the question of why conformance is
important at all?

Steven









-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Simius Puer
Sent: 20 January 2010 11:18
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Good page titles - friendly SEO

Hi Steven

The homepage and other key high-level pages of a website do benefit from
having the company name in them...you just don't want every single page to
begin with it for a number of reasons:

1. When you bookmark a page often you see only the first few words in
your bookmarks folder - having multiple pages bookmarked on a site that
all
start with the same thing means your bookmarks are pretty hopeless
2. Pages do *not* get most of their page weight from the title tag
although you should include keywords here. Also, the further away from
the
beginning of a title your keyword is the less weight search engines will
give it so keyword stuffing does not work.

The click-through rate is far more important than stuffing every last
keyword you have into a title.

In terms of using the company name in the title, I agree with you - but only
for high level pages....

The homepage should be something like:
[Company Name], [brief description including keywords], [location or area
served (if appropriate)]

Other high-level pages need the company name but their purpose (or
product/service) should be put first, e.g.:
Customer service policy | [Company Name]

...of course this is a little bit of a simplistic overview and should be
considered on a case by case basis, but the basic idea remains.

Writing good clear titles meets all your requirements for SEO, SERPs,
accessibility, and UX (e.g. bookmark quality) in one go...there is not
"clash of interest". There is little point in compromising any one of these
aspects for a small gain elsewhere.

Don't forget to write good meta descriptions too - these don't carry any SEO
weight but add quality to your SERPs making them a little more
accessibility-friendly.

Funnily enough I've been reading a similar discussion over on SEOmoz which
has not considered the accessibility of titles, and yet it comes to the same
conclusions - good practice is good practice :]