Forum Moderators: rogerd
On my forum anyway, users rarely use topic-focused titles (thoughtless bunch ;)); they're usually more often like "What can I do?" when the actual topic is "Leaking carburettor".
I was thinking that I might go back over posts that are more than, say, 2 months old and edit the titles so they reflect the content of the post more accurately, and so rank better for their key term.
Does anyone know of a downside? Or alternatively, any other tweaks I can make while I'm at it? :)
Cheers
Cy
Any time the title does not reflect the content of the post. It should be descriptive of the post.
In fact, if you watch WebmasterWorld closely, you'll notice we often change a title of a thread to make it more descriptive. It happens fairly regularly.
The only downside is the rankings you may get for random phrases. I think we ranked number one in Google for "my feet stink [webmasterworld.com]" at one point. ;-)
The essential randomness of user-selected titles can work in your favor at times. In studying the logs of a busy forum, I often find traffic being generated by keywords or phrases that I never would have thought about introducing myself. Even misspelled words or odd usages can pick up the occasional hit.
So, I'd recommend tweaking the truly meaningless titles immediately. "Widget buying advice needed" is not only better SEO than "Help me!", it will draw more relevant views and more useful replies.
A well constructed title also helps new members who might be looking for help on a "Leaking carburettor" but won't bother to go and click on every single "Help!" or "What can I do?" title to see if that particular thread does contain the information or not.
So yes, it makes good SEO-sense, but it also makes good sense from a user friendliness point of view as well.
I can remember back spending whole days editing titles. It's just plain courtesy to site visitors to have readable titles that make sense, and sometimes doing minor corrections can even save the poster some embarrassment, because comments have been made on occasion. There's no reason to allow something silly to be a distraction.
Titles need to be changed to reflect the main topic of what the discussion is supposed to be about. IMHO people need to be less focused on sensitivity and think more about consideration toward others. It's nothing more than a matter of courtesy.
The other edit I'll always make is to eliminate egregious punctuation, like,
"---~~~<<< Need Help ASAP!!!!!!! >>>~~~---"
I doubt if this has much SEO impact, but it sure helps the appearance of the forum. It does help if the thread title ends up being the title in the SERPs, too. (Not that the illustrated title is likely to show up in any searches at all...)
Cheers
Cy
