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I would be grateful for any advice.
the search engines may not recognise your site and have to re-cache it (not sure if that is the correct term?)
I have never heard that one before.
All that's happened is you have diluted the keyword density you already had in the title.
The drop is inevitable, but, before you change it back, you'll want to see if your overall traffic has increased as a result of doing better in the search engines for terms/phrases that you were not appearing for previously.
TJ
As the same key words are still included, should we still achieve high rankings for the same search terms as before? Will it take time for the search engines to 'see' the site again because it has changed significantly (and after they have, will I find the rankings improving once again). I hope I'm not just asking the same question in a different way here.
As the same key words are still included, should we still achieve high rankings for the same search terms as before?
May I ask why they were changed? Were they performing well before the change? The position and balance of keywords in the title is important. Adding additional keywords to the title may have diluted what was there originally or you may have too much density now compared to what you had previously.
I hope I'm not just asking the same question in a different way here.
Yes, you are basically ;-)
Re-read my post. You are diluting the density of the previously ranking keywords in your titles.
TJ
JJ
I changed them because most pages were titled according to individual content (for example a page containing a news story would be titled 'newsroom') rather than reflecting keywords of the site.
When you say "rather than reflecting keywords of the site", do you mean that you took the previous titles and just dropped keyword phrases in that were applicable to the entire site?
Or, did you change the title to reflect the actual content on each page?
Thank you both for all of your help!
[edited by: agerhart at 2:53 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] No URL Drops Per TOS [/edit]
Google works on pages, not domains, so, as pageoneresults says, your page title keywords should reflect the content of each page, not the overall site.
TJ
And every page title on the site now contains the same title.
Ack! If that is the case, you may have made yourself pretty much invisible. I've reviewed plenty of sites where the same title is shared across many pages. The conclusion I've come to is that only one of those pages may do well in the SERPs. The rest of them will sit and collect dust.
The page titles should be unqiue to each page.
I will re-name pages incorporating both key words and words that relate to page content.
Does that sound correct?
Thanks again for all of your help
I will re-name pages incorporating both key words and words that relate to page content.
I'm assuming that means that you will update the
<title>Yes, you have your work cut out for you today. May I ask where you got the idea to make all page titles the same? I'd like to make sure that those reading this topic take this seriously as page titles are the most important element on the page.
It would be good to know of the central body for website guidelines. I have done searches on the internet to find an international standard that we should be working within but have found that this has often confused me further. We want the site to be completely within any guidelines set.
Sure this is a case by case exception, but there are no real hard rules that sites having the same titles on all pages cannot have excellent rankings.
In my experience, if a website has excellent content and a large amount of quality incoming links, having the same title on each page doesn't matter much.
Hello bostonseo, could you please expand on your above comment. Tell us what the strategy would be to utilize the same
<title>
Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!
> It would be good to know of the central body for website guidelines.
Well, there really isn't any "central authority" on Web site design - Search engines are free to rank Web pages in any way they like. The success or failure of a search engine algorithm depends on whether searchers feel tht it returns relevant results for their searches.
However, there are a few resources that stand out, and here is a search [google.com] that brings up one of them (as well as several follow-ons) that are worth reading.
Jim
I guess you've gotten the message that you just went backwards.
The title is the core element on a page. I often build the content of a page around target phrases contained in a highly focussed title. The title has a limited length and a limited number of phrases it can effectively target. Take a look at:
Building the Perfect Page - Part II - The Basics
Developing an effective <title> element.
[webmasterworld.com...]
You want to develop your title in a way where you are targeting your primary phrase for that page.
There's also a question of how focussed your entire site should be, but that's a whole other discussion. I'd do some site searches here on theming and theme pyramids.
PS... A thread that seems really appropriate to your question is:
Title Tags: A badly written title will sink your site
How to sabotage your web site without even knowing it.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Thanks again!
