Changing Titles to Improve SEO Performance
Search professionals are fond of reminding us that SEO is an ongoing process. In some ways, that’s an obvious proposition. Adding new content, building new backlinks… Those SEO staples are clearly not one-off affairs.
The idea of perpetually improving SEO isn’t limited to those obvious machinations, though. The idea of changing title tags as a means of improving your site’s SEO is a perfect example on ongoing on-page improvement.
The underlying principle to this tactic is that by changing the titles you may be able to rank for different and/or the “right” keywords after making an adjustment. Generally speaking, experts recommend revisiting the tags on pages (or sites, for that matter) that are significantly underperforming in hopes of breathing some life into them. SEO Theory, for example, recommends changing “the titles on your least successful pages twice a year.”
Changing your title tags is an easy way to increase return on your already-made content investment. It doesn’t require a webmaster to create anything “new” (other than the tags).
It is worth noting that title changes can result in short-term SERP drop-offs. You may find yourself actually ranking lower for a particularly keyword after adjusting the title. That drop, however, is often temporary. After a few weeks pass, you should be “making a comeback” with respect to search engine performance.
A word of warning, though, it is possible to do more harm than good! Sometimes, the changes actually create long-term SEO damage for the pages. That’s why it makes sense to “test” adjustments on pages that aren’t performing well in the first place. That undercuts any real risk associated with making adjustments.
One commenter explained how tag alterations, if not done correctly, may produce negative SEO repercussions, further demonstrating why you don’t want to “mess” with your top-performing pages:
If you made <title> changes without taking into consideration the page markup, internal anchor text leading to that page, etc., you may have changed the meaning of that page and disrupted the indexing routines. All you can do now is wait and see. Hopefully your titles did not become diluted with keywords or phrases that the page is not “naturally” optimized for.
If you’d like to give you’re disappointing page a boost, consider changing the tags in a manner consistent with its existing content.
Using H1 Tags for Effective SEO
While a great deal of SEO focus is applied to off-page efforts (getting those ever-important backlinks), it’s important to remember the “roots” of SEO–on-page optimization. In that spirit, let’s look at H1 tags and how you can use them to make your pages more attractive to Google and the other search engines.
Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are part of HTML coding and they alert the search engine bots that what they’re reading is considered more important than the other content on the page. The H1 tag sits atop of the tagging hierarchy and judicious use of the element can be an effective SEO tool. Search engines tend to take notice of the words surrounding by the H1 tag.
SEOManagement provides some insight regarding H1s and search engines:
Search engines interpret header tags as indicators of relevancy. They perceive H1 and H2 tagged text as the most important part of the. That’s why header tags should be used wisely in order to reinforce the overall effectiveness of the content and contribute to higher search engine rankings. Too many H1 tags throughout the regular text body may have a negative impact on search engine rankings. H1 tag should contain the central keyword of the web page. If there are secondary keywords they can be given more weight with the help of a H2 tag.
The H1 tag should only be used once per page. You’re not going to fool the search engines by wrapping every keyword on a page in the H1 wrapper–that will just dilute its effectiveness.
Since you’re only using the H1 one time, it’s important to make a smart decision. You don’t want to waste the H1 tag on something trivial like a date. Ideally, you’re going to choose to use it for the page’s title text–and that text is going to accurately depict the rest of the page’s content while simultaneously using the keyword for which you’re trying to rank.
Evaluate your pages in terms of tag use. If you’re not making the most of your H tags, it might be time to crank up your HTML editor and to get to work!
