brinked - 7:52 pm on Apr 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

What about Keyword Title Stuffing. I just watched the Whiteboard friday over at SeoMoz and Rand was talking about people who write titles like the one below being bad. Big Widget, Green Tall Widgets, Stylish Widgets For Sale Instead he recommends something like this Stylish Big & Tall Green Widgets For Sale at Brand Name I can see why this needs to be changed, it is definitely over doing it and doesn't flow naturally. He said to make sure to change all of your titles that look like #1 to look more like #2 before the over op penalty goes through. My big concern, because I am guilty of 95% of the #1 option, what happens when I change so many titles at once? We're talking 90-100 categories all being changed at once. Is it going to do more harm than good? They will be essentially using the same keywords, just in a more natural flow.

Snowman68, Page titles are the first thing to get abused. The page title is one of the most important on site seo factors. It tells our audience and search engines what exactly our website is about. This is exactly why there is no need to keep repeating the same phrases over and over in the body. Your website can be about green widgets, put that in your title tag and you don't need to have a single mention of green widgets on the page itself.

If you visit an image gallery, the front page is full of images. The page title says what kind of image gallery it is. You do not need to put in text in the body that this website is an image gallery, that is already understood and assumed.

As for keyword stuffing in the page title I have heard mixed reviews. My personal opinion is that a page title like this: Big Widget, Green Tall Widgets, Stylish Widgets For Sale

Is something to avoid. Instead, I would put something like this: Buy Big, Green Tall and Stylish widgets.

This way you are not repeating the word widgets over and over and you are giving a more readable description. You now also have more room to place descriptive text. Remember your page title and meta descriptions tags are your sales pitch. That is what the users are seeing when they see your result in the SERPs.

Instead of listing every type of widget you sell in the home page title. Why not have a page dedicated to each widget with an in depth analysis of those types of widgets along with images, videos, graphs etc?

I see too many times people trying to get their homepage to rank for all of their terms and that is just not the way to go. Focus on your inner pages, and when you get the traffic to them, there is less clicking involved fro your user which provides for a better experience. We already see google substituting inner pages instead of homepages, so clearly they want webmasters to go this route as well.

As for changing a lot of page titles at once, I would try to do it in sections. Maybe do the homepage first and wait a few weeks. You might experience a slight ranking drop at first and thats normal when changing your page title.