Keyword repetition in title

Does it help? Is it punished?

[umbria]

I'm wondering about repeting a keyword in my title, so that I get more matches on two word searches. Will this help or do the search engines frown on it?

Here is an example of what I'm thinking. If I had a bike shop I might use a page title like this:

CycleWorld: Racing Bikes Mountain Bikes Touring Bikes

rather than

Cycle World: Racing, Mountain and Touring Bikes

My presumption is that I would rank higher for searches on "racing bikes" and "mountain bikes" etc. using the first title. But will the repetition of "bikes" be penalized?

Any thoughts?

[stevenha]

Don't trust me, I'm no expert, but I thought I'd reply, to see if it would provoke others to reply too...

Most sites use a keyword phrase once in a title. Thats safe and generally appreciated. It also helps keep your title short. Recently on this forum, someone suggested that a 5 word title was "currently" or recently a good length for Google, but maybe thats a little too short, to convince people to click on it.(?) Who knows.

Here's my provocative injection to the forum: I was looking at searches a while back, of two-keyword phrases, and I thought I detected a slight Google preference when 1.5 keywords were in the title. (ie, a title like this: Mountain bikes, racing and touring bikes. )

[Macguru]

Hi umbria,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld. Did you read paynt's welcome post [webmasterworld.com]? Nice way to get started here.

A good rule of thumb is to put the targeted keyword once at the beginning of a 5 to 8 words page title. I would avoid repetition.

Put your most important keywords in visible ereas of home page and craft some pages focusing on each of them elswere in site. ie one page for each of those variants :

Racing Bikes
Racing Bike
Mountain Bikes
Mountain Bike
Touring Bikes
Touring Bike

Title and content should focus on each.

You can go for 'bike' or other synonyms on this tool [inventory.overture.com] to get suggestions.

[WebGuerrilla]

umbria,

Another resource you might want to check out is Search Engine theme Pyramids [searchengineworld.com].

It will help you understand in greater detail the strategy Mac is talking about. If you use a pyramid type structure to your site, you don't have to tery and get all possible keywords on one page. For the most part, if a keyword phrase is worth going after, it needs to have its own title tag devoted to it.

[umbria]

Thanks to all who replied. I'm actually glad title stuffing isn't helpful, because it would have distorted my index page.

The theme pyramid is a very powerful concept. I'm going to look into it seriously, and again it's reassuring how good information design and usability seem to contribute to good search ranking.