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>versions of the word(plural, etc..).
That can help with getting found for the plural and singular version of a word in a phrase, especially with non-competitive words.
There are some very, very long titles to be found, that doesn't mean it's doing any good. It's probably best to stick with fairly short titles.
also try to optimize for keyphrases. What sounds better from your visitors point of view - "Healthy Diets" or "Healthy Diet" ? Try to build your content around that phrase.
I don't think you should use all your keywords diet, diets, dieting together in the title, instead try them for different pages, for home page title begin with your most important keyword.
Not aware that google penalises for long titles.
Nicik
Sometimes it can depend on the circumstances with a given site, as in cases where there's a limitation on the number of pages you can do or optimize for that you can't get around. On your own site(s), you can maximize it by doing one page/one phrase. Client sites can sometimes lack that kind of flexibility; there may be only 6 pages total contracted for, so it can't hurt to go for a little extra mileage.
There can be pages that will pull for a couple of phrases when there's little competition, but those can be very targeted. There's one interior page on a site that gets more than all the rest of the site put together for several search terms (which was accidental, incidentally), particularly certain times of the year for gift-oriented searches. I've got pages and pages of logfiles printed out, mostly gleaned from a limited portion of the site, and about every three months suggest adding items for some low-competition, high demand search terms that are strictly seasonal, though dead the rest of the year. Never done. If it were my own site there would have been products and pages added for those items and related ones long ago - one page for each, one phrase per page, one per page title. That one site's been an education in itself on how people shop for gifts.
While one is best, there's no known penalty for using a little more. With keywords that are very non-competitive, with a low number of searches and pages returned at Google, you can stretch it a little beyond the optimum, particularly on the interior pages of the site.
Surrounding your primary keyword with select complementary words can help create multiple keyword phrases that may bring added returns.
Candy (primary keyword): Old Fashioned Hard Candy recipes & supplies.
Though candy is used only once, think of the possible phrases that can pull in results: "old fashioned hard candy" - "old fashioned candy" - old fashioned recipes" - "hard candy" - "candy recipes" - "candy recipes & supplies" and so on.
Though you might target one key phrase, strategic copy can give enough validation to the associated phrases to enhance your keyword/keyphrase effectiveness.
How much you lose by targeting more than one phrase depends on how competitive your target phrases are. Google also gives some weight to word order and proximity. As I just reported in a thread in the Google forum, I had a title in the form "CityName widgets - red and blue widget information," which had been doing well for "CityName widget information." But when I lengthened the title and added an extra word before "red," my rankings for "CityName widget information" completely vanished. I removed the word immediately, and Google has already reindexed, and the ranking is back up where it was. I haven't been paying that much attention recently to these factors on other engines, but I would think they're similar.
As for word repetition, that's been a hard one for me. I'm in a situation now where I'm looking at a fairly small site with separate pages for "widgets," "gizmos," etc. On each of these, I want to use the modifiers "red" and "blue." So, I'm wondering about just what you're asking... should I go with...
a) "Red and blue widgets"
or should I go with
b)"Red widgets and blue widgets"?
In the past, my tendency has been not to repeat the keywords... there used to be a rule of thumb to use a keyword once only in the title... but I see so many sites repeating words and ranking well that I'm wondering...
- Does an exact phrase match outweigh the risk of a repetition penalty?
- And is there a repetition penalty at all... or might there even be a boost for using the keyword twice?
