I was just wondering if anyone had any experience with title tag capitalisation and its effects on SERP rankings and SEO in general. I'm SEOing a site at the moment whose web designers have setup auto-generated title tags but the title tags use predominantly captialised words. So for exampe: "CATEGORY NAME - Site Name" Will this be penalised by Google?
In my opinion, your on the right track and I don't think your site will get penalized if you'll use those tags for your title, coz most of the sites being optimized use that and still effect on SERP.
dear, no problem at all. you can continue. but the thing is only keep initial letters of all words capital instead of whole word. this will be more readable.
well google never penalizes any site for these small things. having a optimized title tag is very important for every site it surely affects your rankings read Google's webmaster guidelines as it says that you should have a very descriptive title for your webpages.
If whole word capitalisation has no effect on rankings then has anyone ever done a test on CTR from SERPs with some words being wholely capitalise - I find it hard to believe it wouldn't have an effect on the CTR way or another. It would be great to test for power words like FREE or NEW if you have pages ranking well for those sorts of terms. *adds to list of things needed to test for*
not for rankings alone, no, however getting it right (or wrong) can make a big difference to your clickthrough rates, you can even rank lower but take the clicks from the sites above you if you do it better than them. it's not all about rankings you know
The click through rate is an interesting question, particularly since the title is displayed in the SERPs. I suspect it depends on market niche and demographics. Still, it would be worth a test, especially if one is in position 2 through 4. Would the use of caps increase click through over those in higher positions?
Google won't penalise a page for having a capitalized title element (it's title element not title tag). I could see it reducing CTR though, capitalizing an entire title looks spammy, I know when I'm using Google I'll sometimes skip a capitalized listing because I'll expect it to be low quality. It's like when someone comments on a forum or something and capitalizes every word, it's almost always a rubbish comment not worth your time to read. David Law
Title tag capitalization by itself has absolutely no effect on rankings, IMO. The consequent changes in CTR do have an effect. These are all very minor metrics unless you're in an extremely competitive niche (Of course it never hurts to be perfect...). What matters most are relevant backlinks and fresh content!
Fresh content doesn't increase Google rankings, to some degree it can reduce them since if you are constantly adding new content to a site for the sake of it you are taking link benefit away from important pages. Updating an old page so it's got fresh content doesn't increase rankings either, unless the change had a posative SEO effect, but then it could also have been a negative change taking rankings down. More info on fresh content http://www.seo-gold.com/does-google-prefer-fresh-content.html Aged backlinks is the most important factor in Google SEO right now, without aged backlinks no matter how good your content is optimised it won't do well in Google. They don't have to be relevant backlinks either, just aged, though relevant links are better. David Law
With the proper marketing approach, fresh content (like a blog) is always good IMO. It brings about more deep links. You can of course concentrate the majority of your link building efforts on the homepage and other targetted areas.
There is no need to worry about this. There are allot of website, which are using Capital words in there title and ranked NO.1 for there keywords.
It's a common misconception creating content for the sake of it for backlinks is good. It's not. I used to think that way years ago and made some classic literature sites and broke each book into hundreds of pages (so sites with tens of thousands of pages). What happend was only the main page of the book tended to get much traffic, the rest was a waste of time traffic wise, but each page cost me some link benefit to keep it indexed! If a new page doesn't add something to a site, don't add it because it's going to take a share of your sites link benefit with giving little back (takes more than it gives). I could very easily write 10 pages of content about Title optimization, put them all up on the same site and think if I link them all to the main article it's going to help it (and it would at a big cost). But that means I now have to send link benefit to 10 more pages that are highly unlikly to pull more traffic in (I might get a few extra long tail SERPs), so I'm paying X link benefit for very little extra traffic! Would be better to create 10 new pages targeting new SERPs, in this way the link benefit I'm spending (taking away from current pages) on those 10 new pages are going to at least pull in new traffic (new SERPs). To give an example I have a joke site http://www.free-funny-jokes.com/ and until about a year ago I didn't list racist jokes (don't like them). The site was quite stagnant traffic wise since most joke types was already added and adding more was repeating current SERPs. So I gave racist jokes a try and WHAM massive traffic increase almost over night (one page alone has over 600 comments)! I could have kept adding more knock knock and doctor doctor jokes until the site had 100,000 of them and seen no significant traffic increase. A handful of racist jokes and about 1,500 extra visitors a day! David Law