The Role Page Titles Play in Searches

Page Titles: More Than a Sell Line

By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, SEO and Social Media Consultant

A page title is far more than a sell line on your Web page. It should immediately tell the reader the main topic covered on your page, and it should be keyword rich. This shouldn't be a place for your company name as much as a place to tell what your company is about. It has huge effect on SEO (search engine optimization) or SERPS (search engine ranking).

Very often I see websites list a business or company name on their home page. For SEO that may be effective if someone already knows your business or company name, but many times as a business you’re trying to attract new customers. How can they find you? If someone new conducts a search and they don’t know your name but they will search for what you offer, they may not find you because your emphasis has been on your company’s name. That could be fatal.

For the home page, you can actually accomplish both by positioning a keyword for what your business offers first and your business name second: Doohickies – Joe Smoes. That way, someone looking for doohickies will find you among stores or business that sell doohickies, and someone looking for a store or business named Joe Smoes will find it.

Inside the site, where you break your pages down into more definitive services or products, your page titles should be even more specific: Red Doohickies or Metal Dookickies or European Doohickies, using keywords you know your customers will use to try to find you.

When someone is building your website, make sure they have thought of this. Many designers, developers, and writers put more thought into how pretty the site looks or reads than in how well someone can find it. Many aren't versed in building a site for search engine optimization and may, in fact, gloss over the subject.

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Rewrite, At Least Revise

Content - Reuse or Rewrite?
By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, SEO

Someone asked on Twitter about the advisability of taking posts from one blog and posting them on a new blog. Was it cheating? Was it bad for SEO?

My quick answer (140-character limit) was that you should rewrite some of it as a service to your reader, and search engines might penalize you for simply reusing the same content.

Here is my longer answer:
First, authors reuse and repurpose their content all the time. It doesn’t hurt as long as the readership is different and the information is valuable. However, you won’t gain many readers and you will gain a bad reputation if the readers you do have see that you’re simply repeating used material.

Second, search engines penalize for creating duplicate content to make it look like new. However, they realize there are times when duplicate content makes sense. The easy way to reuse existing information is to reorganize it or write down the most salient points and then rewrite the piece around those points. That all said, one or two pages of reused content isn’t going to kill you – it’s the more-you-do-it-the-more-it’s-going-to-cost-you effect you have to worry about.

Third, don’t forget the value of inbound links to your SEO effort. If you have a lot of duplicate content, other sites may not see a value to linking to your new site, whereas if you have new content they may link to both the old and the new. Simply repeating content, you may be shorting yourself an opportunity simply to save some effort or time.

The question of whether it is cheating depends on your audience and whether they were expecting something new and different. How did you set their expectations?

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