page titles

kakee

Hi folks I hope I am posting in the right area. I have a website for dog friendly accommodation in Ireland. I have titles on the pages such as county kerry, county cork etc. The question I have is if I changed these titles to dog friendly accommodation kerry etc would that improve google rankings or would it make any difference.http://www.staydoggy.com is the name of it. Thanks for looking any help would be gratefully received

tricky D

Better to post in Internet Marketing / SEO - some threads for you read there.

Yes it would make a difference.
Eg your home page would be better with 'Staydoggy Dog Friendly Accommodation' as the title. The word home is useless.
County pages: Dog Friendly Accommodation in County
10-60 characters in the title tag only. I prefer to keep it under 40.

Also bear in mind people misspell accommodation sometimes with one m or c. Pop one or two of these into you meta keywords tag on one or two pages, not on the actual pages.

You also need to do a lot more. You need to learn about heading tags, correct use of strong tags style sheets (css). Head over to http://www.w3schools.com and learn up on html/xhtml and css.

Wouldn't recommend spaces in filenames either and left align more of your text for readability.

Dinner, gotta go, hth.

Hoku

I found a nice checklist of DOs and DONTs for search engine optimisation.
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

I'd also recommend working out a standard layout for your pages, as it seems every one of them is scripted individually. As tricky D said, you'd want to brush up on clean (x)HTML and CSS before getting into the hardcore SEO.

Sully

The website needs a lot of work in order to hit SEO hard. If its done right, thats half the battle. Then its a matter of link building really.

B1977

Should each page on the website have a different page title,


www.magicshoplimerick.com

Sully

B1977 wrote: »

Should each page on the website have a different page title,


www.magicshoplimerick.com

Most definiately. From my inital looking, that site doesnt meet two of the most basic SEO standards which can also fail other tests (web accessibility, clean valdidating code etc).

Every website, ideally, should have a page title in the following order;

"Website Name -> Page Title"

This gets a bit more complex if your an eCommerce site or have multiple sub-sections/pages but most people getting that done wont hire the lad done the street who hasnt a clue and will get someone professional who usually does it all right anyway.

B1977

could you show me how the title should be done right

Derek B

Sully wrote: »

Every website, ideally, should have a page title in the following order;

"Website Name -> Page Title"

I don't necessarily agree. If it's a new business, and you're trying to build brand reputation, then yes I would follow this format.

However, in the majority of cases the site will rank very highly for brand related search terms. In these instances, IMO it's better to reverse your order to:
"Page Title -> Website Name", as it's said words at the beginning hold more weight, and your page title is more likely to contain relevant keywords for that page than your brand/website name.

Sully

Derek B wrote: »

I don't necessarily agree. If it's a new business, and you're trying to build brand reputation, then yes I would follow this format.

However, in the majority of cases the site will rank very highly for brand related search terms. In these instances, IMO it's better to reverse your order to:
"Page Title -> Website Name", as it's said words at the beginning hold more weight, and your page title is more likely to contain relevant keywords for that page than your brand/website name.

Actually, on second thoughts, this makes much more sense. I personally would think you should always have the business name on it but since some search engines cut the characters down, its best to have them the right way around which is "Page Title -> Website Name". I'll follow up on this in the morning to explain more for those unsure. Thanks Derek

B1977; Depending how the website was coded, there should be an area at the top of each page file like this;

<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>

You would be editing the text "Page Title" so it becomes "Page Title -> Your Website Name". Make sense? Eg

<html>
<head>
<title>Products - Alpha Shop</title>
</head>

(My page name is "Products" and the website is called "Alpha Shop")

Derek B

Sully wrote: »

Thanks Derek

No worries

Sully wrote: »

I personally would think you should always have the business name on it but since some search engines cut the characters down, its best to have them the right way around which is "Page Title -> Website Name".

There's 2 aspects to this that need consideration IMO. The first is the search engine results pages (SERPs) - if your title is longer than 65 characters, the end will be cut off in Google. I believe it's better to have your brand name cut off (assuming you're already ranking well for brand terms) than the product (for example) that you searching for. If your title is within 65 characters, this isn't an issue (although I'm nearly sure I heard before that click through rates are higher if the searched term is bolded at the beginning of the title in the SERPS).


The second point I think is worth noting (unrelated to word order in title) is that longer titles aren't always better. Take this simplistic example:

Title A: "keyword1 keyword 2 - keyword3 keyword4 - brand" (say this is under 65 characters)

Title B: "keyword1 keyword 2 - brand"

TitleA includes keywords (3 and 4) that Title B doesn't have, so with this title, the page would have a higher chance of ranking for keyword3 and keyword4.

However, let's assume keyword1 is the most important keyword for the page: in title1, keyword1 makes up roughly 1/5th of the title, so the keyword density would be around 20%. In Title B, keyword1 is one of only 3 terms, so for argument sake, it's keyword density might be 33%, significantly higher than the 20% for Title A.

The shorter the title, the greater the impact of each term contained within.

irishlad054

thanks for replies all. Just to make sure, for example on my webite www.staydoggy.com I should change the title for tipperary page from county tipperary to something else.Should I change it to dog friendly accommodation tipperary or county tipperary staydoggy.com. I am confused as like I said some pages rank higher than others when you type in dog friendly accommodation (county name).

Derek B

irishlad054 wrote: »

I should change the title for tipperary page from county tipperary to something else.Should I change it to dog friendly accommodation tipperary or county tipperary staydoggy.com. .

I would say 'Dog Friendly Accommodation in Tipperary - StayDoggy.com' would be a very good title for this page. 'County Tipperary' by itself is too vague, there's no mention of dog accommodation.

Derek B

irishlad054 wrote: »

I am confused as like I said some pages rank higher than others when you type in dog friendly accommodation (county name).

Could be more to do with the competition than the pages on your site and their structure/content.

Sully

Derek B wrote: »

I would say 'Dog Friendly Accommodation in Tipperary - StayDoggy.com' would be a very good title for this page. 'County Tipperary' by itself is too vague, there's no mention of dog accommodation.

Agreed but why add ".com"? Surely the name by itself is more then suitable, as adding more is just waste..

Mick Regan

There seems to be a lot of SE competition in the pet friendly accommodation arena.

I know this is an adwords tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) but it does give you an idea of what you're up against. (Set it to Ireland if your target market is Ireland, or i guess you could check the UK as well as pets might travel from there.)

Checking exact phrase 'dog friendly accommodation tipperary' Google did'nt have enough data to show number of searches - which i think means its very low.

'dog friendly holiday' - 590 global monthly searches - no data for Ireland - low competition.
'dog friendly holidays' - 4400 global monthly searches - 36 in Ireland - high competition.
'dog friendly accommodation' - 27000 global monthly searches, 590 in Ireland - high competition.

(If the adword competition is high, then the competition from sites using onsite keywords is probably high as well.)

A lot of marketeers say you should be looking for phrases that are searched on 200+ times a day as a starter, but with relatively low competition. Alternative would be to have multiple pages targetting different keywords so that you're picking up a broader spread even if the number of searches is lower for specific terms.

Check out the link above and enter different phrases - try and find searched for phrases relevant to your target market with at least a low to middle competition.

Its a tough one as you're up against the holiday market in general so you'll need to get creative. You'll also need to put a fair bit of thought into getting backlinks as they'll be a key factor here i think.

I'm also thinking you should go for a .ie domain (maybe dog-friendly-accommodation.ie or something similar?).

Having devoured the above, now think about the site itself. The coding needs to be tidied up in a number of areas. Keyword meta tag for example - way too many keywords. CSS should preferably be in an external file - better performance. Plus other areas that need attention.

I do actually think you've got a market here, especially as more Irish will be holidaying at home. Two areas to focus on:

1. Get found on the search engines.
2. Make it beneficial for accommodation owners to advertise through you. (Get number 1 right and this should hopefully be easier).