What's better for SEO?

[StyleHorizons]

Hi,

Just a quick question about page titles and SEO.

I've been reading on a few sites that the shorter your page title the more relevance Google gives it which may help when trying to optimize your SEO. But other sites say to try and have your main Keyword at the beginning and end of your page title

So my question is, which of these examples do you think would give my page title more weight?

Example

The web page in question is for the brand Converse. It has a basic bio regarding Converse at the top and then a list of all Converse products underneath.

Page Title 1 - Converse Footwear
Page Title 2 - Converse
Page Title 3 - Converse at Site Name
Page Title 4 - Converse Footwear - Site Name - FREE Delivery on all Converse Footwear


So what page title do you think would be best?

Cheers

John

[JhnStcks]

No one really knows how google works (apart from the bods at google of course), so everyone has an opinion of the best way to work the system.

Supposedly the more keyword you have the more diluted you will make them.  I would probabaly go for a mixture of 1 and 3 and have sometihing like Converse fOOTWEAR AT sITE NAME.

[StyleHorizons]

No one really knows how google works (apart from the bods at google of course), so everyone has an opinion of the best way to work the system.

Supposedly the more keyword you have the more diluted you will make them.  I would probabaly go for a mixture of 1 and 3 and have sometihing like Converse fOOTWEAR AT sITE NAME.

Your right of course, no one apart from Google knows but this is one of those topics I love to hear other people's opinions about. Especially if that person has had some success/experience in trying to rank well with Google.

Thanks for your opinion on this, something to think about 

[Gothic Dropshipping]

I've always thought putting the site name in a waste of keyword space... the site name is often your URL anyhow and will generally make it do well for those words, so personally I tend to go for 5 or 6 keywords which will be further backed up by appearing as textual content in the site and with links pointing to your site also using those words in the titles.

[drew]

I've always thought putting the site name in a waste of keyword space... the site name is often your URL anyhow and will generally make it do well for those words, so personally I tend to go for 5 or 6 keywords which will be further backed up by appearing as textual content in the site and with links pointing to your site also using those words in the titles.

I agree with above.

What I would also do, is use the catagories to your advantage for the keyword, especially when doing header tags.

Top level category - shoes
Next - converse
Then style, and either have size as an attribute, or list the prodcuts indivually.


So your page title / header tage thingy should look like

yousite.com ¦ shoes ¦ converse ¦ style

Gives you more keywords for your money. And don't overdo it on the key words. In the old days, they meant alot, then everyone realised how many people were searching for that Pamela Anderson video........

Now it goes alot more on the content of the site being offered, and how that relates to the keywords.

[StyleHorizons]

Thanks for all the replies, very interesting stuff.

I was looking at possible new carts and came across BigCommerce and there post http://www.bigcommerce.com/ecommerce-blog/video-what-is-keyword-proximity-and-why-is-it-important/ was what prompted this one.

[mahesh adodis]

To use key words in header tags, because if your website in HTML they find page organizational structure, and to CSS coding a design without table.

[BillyBigalow]

  and to CSS coding a design without table.

Is this the same type of table as in one made with excel, or is it something different, I am worried that if I put a table on my site such as a size or postage table then it's no good for SEO

[Grifter]

css files are stylesheets that can be used by multiple pages. They are also used to get rid of table designed pages or tables.

[scotserve]

Better "html" but has little to do with good SEO

[Bahi]

All things being equal, the shorter the better. However the fact is most short versions of the keywords you want to use for SEO are probably used by many others.

If your company name is a dictionary word and is related to your business, then it is best if you can just use the company name alone for the domain name.

Let's take a hypothetical industry called "Teer" and your compnay is "Teer Consulting Group". Well, if "teer.com" by any chance is not used, go get it! Else go for "teerconsulting" or "teer-consulting" etc.

Say however "teer" is an established industry and all related domains were taken up. Your company name is "weer". Well, "weer.com" will not get your ranking up very fast. "weer-teer.com" will probably be better.

Is it easier for your clients or prospect to remember "weer.com" or "weer-teer.com", well you are right that the shorter the easier to remember.

Which outweights which? SEO or "easy-to-remember"? It really depends on the nature of your business and how you want to market and publicize your site. If you already have extensive network, sending mailers or word-of-mouth might just get you far enough without SEO factors.

If you are starting from scratch and depends on people to find you, no one is going to search "weer". So what if it comes out top by searching "weer"? You want to get those who search "teer" and find you in the first few pages. Now, "weer-teer.com" will be handy, isn't it?

If both domains are available, go grab both, make "weer-teer.com" your primary one and have "weer.com" redirected to it. When "weer" beomes a dominant name in the "teer" market, you can then switch it around because people will be search "weer"!

[Rainee Bows]

  and to CSS coding a design without table.

Is this the same type of table as in one made with excel, or is it something different, I am worried that if I put a table on my site such as a size or postage table then it's no good for SEO

are people likely to be searching for terms contained in your postage table ??

Rain
xxxx

[Magdalena]

I agree with this, No one knows how Google works. Still I think, this is true that we should use the keywords as very first words of the title.

[paulc010]

I'm pretty much in agreement with the above, although an observation would be that you maybe shouldn't just think in terms of a keyWORD but also consider using a popular search phrase as your page title. If you used #2 but most people searched for the products you're selling with "converse boots" then you would be missing a trick.

Lets say you sold "Cabbage Patch Kids" dolls. You would use all three words, and possibly also "dolls". Optimising using only "Cabbage" would seem silly and the same applies to other specific products. I think the best advice is to try and match the page title with something succinct that exactly describes the content of the page using terms people would use in a search engine. If you can't create a natural language title, then the technique our good friend at Gothic Dropshipping has shared is a great alternative - but I would try for something natural first - I personally believe it's better.

On tables and css you getting into semantic coding which can be overdone, but in some cases I disagree with scotserve. Sometimes better xhtml does affect SEO since well-formed, accessible pages tend to "look" better to search engine crawlers and the markup correctly provides semantic clues to them as to the importance and nature of the various elements on the page.

Tables are a great way of displaying tabular data. Nothing wrong with using tables. The key is to use them correctly: http://www.tomjewett.com/accessibility/markup.html is a nice couple of examples on what and what not to do.

Paul

[Serendipity]

I'm pretty much in agreement with the above, although an observation would be that you maybe shouldn't just think in terms of a keyWORD but also consider using a popular search phrase as your page title. If you used #2 but most people searched for the products you're selling with "converse boots" then you would be missing a trick.

Lets say you sold "Cabbage Patch Kids" dolls. You would use all three words, and possibly also "dolls". Optimising using only "Cabbage" would seem silly and the same applies to other specific products. I think the best advice is to try and match the page title with something succinct that exactly describes the content of the page using terms people would use in a search engine. If you can't create a natural language title, then the technique our good friend at Gothic Dropshipping has shared is a great alternative - but I would try for something natural first - I personally believe it's better.

On tables and css you getting into semantic coding which can be overdone, but in some cases I disagree with scotserve. Sometimes better xhtml does affect SEO since well-formed, accessible pages tend to "look" better to search engine crawlers and the markup correctly provides semantic clues to them as to the importance and nature of the various elements on the page.

Tables are a great way of displaying tabular data. Nothing wrong with using tables. The key is to use them correctly: http://www.tomjewett.com/accessibility/markup.html is a nice couple of examples on what and what not to do.

Paul

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