Hello, I am in the process of fine-tuning a brand new forum before its official launch. The forum is housed under mydomain.com/forums/ (for now I have a simple landing page on the root, as I do not want the forums to be there). Now, when it comes to SEO, (I am using IPB and MinervaSEO), I have the ability to customize the title, description and keyword tags for each forum (and even each topic and post). I naturally want to do a good job with the main forums and sub forums on my site, however, I hope you can enlighten me re the use of the title tag. On my landing page, the title tag contains "My Site | brief keyword-optimized description of entire site". Now, the question is, should I use the same structure when it comes to my forums and sub forums? Example: Forum 1 Title Tag: "My Site | brief keyword-optimized description of forum 1" I have read that repeating the "My Site" part in all website pages' title tags is actually not good SEO, and that, preferably, each page should have its unique title tag. In the other hand, in practice, most sites I come across do repeat a portion of their title tags in every page, hence, consolidating the site's name as a keyword. Any comments? Thanks in advance!
I am not sure of its relevance to a site's SEO-friendliness, but I think having "My Site" in all your page titles is what users expect, and aids in navigation.
Don't worry too much about meta keywords. Almost every search engine ignores them and documents that they ignore them. Meta description is used heavily by google, when a snippet it not shown. It would be good to have a good meta description, human readable, sentence form, not filled with junk. Users will see this on Google and what you put here can make the difference between a click through or not.
True <meta> elements do NOT influence your rankings at most search engines, ESPECIALLY Google. They ignore <meta name="keywords"> and <meta name="description"> elements when ranking URLs for a particular keyword phrase. However, having good <meta name="description"> elements for your pages DOES affect your click-thru-rates since it is often shown as the snippet for SERP listings at various engines (including Google if all of the keywords from the search phrase also exist in your <meta name="description"> element). I think the confusion above is the fact that you are referring to the <title> element as a <meta> tag or <meta> element. And <title> is NOT a meta tag/element. Only HTML elements starting with <meta...> are meta elements. Title is the MOST important on-page ranking factor. So you DEFINITELY want to give it the most thought of any other on-page factor. I NEVER include sitename in the <title>. Unless your site name contains keywords that you want every page on your site to rank for then it only HURTS your ability to rank instead of helping it. For example, if you have the following as a <title> element on a page on your site: Most search engines (definitely Google) interprets your <title> as "mysite com primary keyword phrase secondary keyword phrase" after they normalize it (replacing all special characters and punctuation with a space). Most search engines view the first word in the <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, etc. as more important than the second word which is more important than the third, etc. Just like content at the top of the page is considered more important than content at the end of the page... content at the start of a major ranking element like <title> is considered more important than content near the end of the element. Also, just like most engines consider keyword density within the content of the page at some level in their ranking algorithm... they also consider keyword density WITHIN individual ranking elements like <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, etc. So by adding Mysite.com at the beginning of EVERY page on your site, you're telling the engines that EVERY page on you site wants to rank PRIMARLY for "mysite com". Not only is your most important targeted keyword phrase NOT first in the <title>, but you now have 2 extra unnecessary words in you <title> which reduces the keyword density of the important words in your title. I know people like to see their site name "in lights" when they see their pages listed in the SERPs, but unless you're a name brand it's NOT going to increase your click-thru-rates and it is going to hurt your rankings. If you're stubborn and just insist on seeing your site name on every page then for God's sake put it at the end. But I would strongly urge you to drop it all together except for mayb your home page (and ONLY then if it contains keywords that you think people will be searching for to find forums like yours).
Actually unless you are a well known brand name people would search for such as Pepsi, Harrods, Korean Air for example then your site name should be at the end of the title tag. The very first keyword (keyword phrase) in the Title tag will have the most weighting, and typically the most density as well (Old school SEO info, most have no clue about) Placing an unknown business name first will hurt your chances of ranking well for your keyword term. You might want to go learn a bit more before adding in comments that are off base.