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.