Single most important change to a page

Size. I see too many 300k pages out there.

<TITLE>

<title></title>

The most important element of a quality web page.

Yup, I would go with TITLE also.

TJ

Size. I see too many 300k pages out there.

Page size doesn't play a role in ranking.

i finally added page titles to my forum posts, hope it helps me in the rankings...

I would go for title as well.

Title, but new content is a close second, if you double or triple a page's relvant content, you will prbably se some SERP movement.

Another vote for title.

+1 for title, well written of course.

Title i would say. But keep an eye on keyword prominence. Try to keep you keyword as close to the sentence. e.g <Title>Keyword blah blah blah</Title> would work better than <Title>blah blah blah keyword</Title>. Good luck

I say provide useful content. But no method is an island.

Try creating a page with a title and no content. Then create another with useful content and no title. Don't include any META tags in either. Then provide equal links into each page. Which do you think would do better?

You probably don't need to actually do it. I'm not going to, but I am convinced that the page with content and no title would stand a better chance of actually showing up in some SERPs. But I would be more surprised to find either.

Y: Title
G: KW strategy

I recently changed my titles to be more specific and include keywords. Haven't changed anything else...yet. Now I get all sorts of hits to my deeper pages that never saw the light of day before.

Definately <title></title>!

I suppose it depends on which part of the page is the weakest - maybe KW density isn't so good compared with your competitors - maybe the copy doesn't read good. Just look at it from a readers point of view.

meta tags

***ducks and runs away***

in what sort of bizarre screwed-up world am I only allowed to make one change to my web page?

;o)
(or

ps.. title, if the page content is relevant to it.

i finally added page titles to my forum posts, hope it helps me in the rankings...

It will, I just did that, as soon as pages were indexed I got top 10s for the subjects of the threads. Of course make sure forum has search engine friendly urls, no session ids given to bots etc.

Try creating a page with a title and no content. Then create another with useful content and no title. Don't include any META tags in either. Then provide equal links into each page. Which do you think would do better?

I did this a while ago, page with title, everything except content, had one or two sentences, looked up one day and it was number one in google for 2 word key word phrase, forced me to expand that part of the site since keyword phrase was not uncommon, but expanding that part of the site worked just like Brett Tabke says it does, add content every day, do everything else right.

Title of course!

[***ducks and runs away***]

LOL

Title is the one!

Is it okay to seperate words in the title with an underscore? Example: Best_Books_on_Widgets

Is it okay to seperate words in the title with an underscore? Example: Best_Books_on_Widgets

Don't do that :( Try a Google search on best_books_on and there are zero results because it is seen as all one word rather than three words.

Usability.

Assuming my page already has a good title, decent content, meta tags, then the single most important change I can make to that page is to be sure that everyone that views it views what I intended, not some obfuscated version.

Are you sure about this underscore thing? I know of several successful optimized sites which use them for filenames. I've been using dashes to seperate words on my sites. I'm not sure if thats the best thing to be doing.

Is it okay to seperate words in the title with an underscore? Example: Best_Books_on_Widgets

I would say no, it is not okay. My first question would be why? What purpose does that serve? For one, it doesn't look right. Two, it goes against most readability standards. And three, it really doesn't make sense to do that.

title,

and if you are dealing with a page size that is large just get the links to the top of the page ;)

content then maybe <title></title>, I've seen sites rank against stiff competition in Y SERPS without a title tag.

Search engines limit size of a cached page. For example, Google will only cache a full page if the size of its HTML is less than 101 Kb (images and external scripts are not included). Yahoo! caches text of up to 500 Kb per page. This means if your HTML page is too large, search engines will not cache the full page, and only the top part of the text will be searchable.

"i finally added page titles to my forum posts, hope it helps me in the rankings... "

Can somebody please clarify this for me? I've seen it mentioned a couple of times about helping your rankings. Is this referring to placing a link to your site in a forum? Does this count as an incoming link?