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[edited by: Andrew_G at 6:36 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2002]
Thanks!
I tend to use a max of 70 characters for Google and I don't repeat a keyword more than twice in the title.
hope this helps
Dazz
I agree with diddlydazz. If you have more than 70 characters, make sure your most important words are within those first 70. I've really been aiming at 65 maximum but its hard to do in some instances.
What do you think a good keyword density is for the text?
Thanks!
Jeff
As I said I *personally* never repeat a keyword more than twice in a title. As Pageoneresults wrote one of the most important things IMO is to place important keywords at the beginning of the title.
for example let's say your keywords are "blue widgets":
all IMO ;)
<title>Blue Widgets - Your one stop shop !</title>
is better than
<title>Your one stop shop for Blue Widgets</title>
and you could go further and use:
<title>Blue Widgets - Your one stop shop for Blue Widgets online</title>
this is just my humble opinion and someone else here may have better ideas :)
hope this helps
Dazz
Not in my experience, google normally cuts off between 68 and 70 sometimes allowing even longer title tags.
I know for *sure* that google doesn't ignore text after the 63rd character, I have experimented ;)
IMHO, I may be wrong :)
Dazz
Also, just to add something, what is a good keyword percentage to have?
Let me give you my two cents. I asked a similar question a week ago ([webmasterworld.com ]). To sum up the thread I was getting beat in the SERPS by competitor's pages who had a lower pagerank than me and the only reason I could find is that the competitors used repeated keywords in their title, thereby increasing their odds of an exact match.
Going against the consensus opinion in the thread, I decided to "optimize" the pages, packing my meta title with repeated keywords, also "sprinkling" keywords throughout the body content (i.e. With the new [keyword] product, you can do all kinds of [keyword] stuff. You can [keyword] the [keyword] with a [keyword]. You can even [keyword] the [keywords]'s [keyword] with a [keyword]). When I was complete, I looked back at all I had done and it looked like total, absolute, filthy, spam. It was so transparent.
I decided, SERPS be damned! I would not be a spammer. I went back through all pages, wrote nice DESCRIPTIVE titles (which somehow got lost in my keyword packing frenzy). Made sure my content seemed natural and easy to read. Now, I can sleep at night again. So what if I haven't squeezed every drop of traffic I could out of "G". I would rather get a good amount of honest traffic and not have to worry about being labeled a spammer.
The only problem is, about half of my pages were indexed with the spam copy. I didn't go completely overboard with the keywords, so hopefully I won't be penalized.
40.02 characters seems to be the average and 86.6% used the keyword once in the title. 6.11% used it twice. Maybe Brett has some more recent information posted somewhere about this.
Dazz
Sorry for the confusion :)
<title>Blue Widgets</title>
or
<title>Blue Widgets - Your one stop shop !</title>
or
<title>Blue Widgets - Your one stop shop for Blue Widgets online</title>
Being a simpleton, I have always used the first because it was easy and it is 100% keyword dense. This is not scientific, but looking at the serps on some of my keywords, I am thinking maybe option 3 is best?
From my understanding, anything inbetween 1% and 7% is good. Now, how you determine the density is another factor. Do you include the metas (which ones), alt tags, etc.?
It varies between each of the SE's and that is why you don't see much discussion centered around exact percentages. Its really all over the board. I know from personal experience that 1.3% to 4.9% seems to be the average range of top ranking pages. There may be someone else here who can enlighten us a little more on that.
pageoneresults:
> Keyword Density is the number of times a given keyword occurs divided by the total number of words on a page.
Yes, but might there also be a density calculation for the HTML title specifically, and for anchor text?
For each of wingslevel's examples, we could ask the same question about a link from a good PR page.
Do the eight extra words water down the important title and link text weightings? I don't know.
The top site with a page title of just "auto insurance" was about 37th - his site was a pr 6 and had only a 3k page size, so he is no neophyte.... I think that this is telling us that longer titles are better and that keyword density within the title is not so important?
Not sure since I've never paid much attention to density. I do know that the title by itself would not pull much weight if it were not for the rest of the on page and off page factors.
If I look at Brett's research from 2000, it appears that the keyword mentioned once in the title had the most weight. Whether or not that applies on this date; 2002-08-09 is not known. I use both theories mentioning it once at all times and sometimes twice depending on the length and how the title is worded.
When I write titles, I think about the user first, then the SE. Most searchers are scanning for keywords in the SERP's. If I can develop an attention getting title using the keyword phrase appropriately, that suits me just fine. I know the site will find its way to the top based on all of the other factors involved, the title being just one of them.
