Changing Site Title and Description?

here's something funny (kind of) to point out...

I had the title of my site read Foremost Groups Inc. - Home Furniture Manufacturing[/quote]

Then, I changed the title to Foremost Groups Inc. - Foremost Home Furniture, in hopes to rank higher for the kw 'Foremost'. In fact, my rank dropped from 6 to 10... when I changed it back, it went back up to #6.

So, yeah, your page title will have a large effect on rankings, and as said, it's a lot of trial and error.

 

Thats unfortunate but then I would question why are you trying to rank for the keyword "Foremost". That term is such a common word in the english vocab, you should be focusing around "Foremost Furniture", its like trying to rank for the term "help" its too vague and can be used with almost any other word in the dictionary.

Worry about short and long tail keywords before trying to go after the brand name.

 

i have a GPT site that i do SEO for. i use the title and the description to kind of manipulate the search engines. here's what I do:

first i identified my high ranking keywords and the keywords that I WANT to rank higher.

then i play those keywords into the title and the description.

sitename.com | free cash, get paid to complete offers, instant paypal payout | sitename is the best place on the internet for free cash offers

desc: this is the best site for free offers and all the wonderful things in the world.

site gets crawled so i change it up like this:

sitename.com | free cash, get paid to complete offers, instant paypal payout, earn free cash for offers

desc: this is the best site for free offers and to get paid instantly.

this technique has worked well for this kind of a website.

 

I am continually tweaking the titles on my established web pages, with good results. Do lots of keyword research, then create a title (or write a new one) that features the keyword(s) and combinations thereof that you think you can compete for.

Case in point: I once had a webpage with a title I really liked. But I later did some keyword research and found that no one was searching for that title's keywords. The page was getting no traffic. So I did some more research (I recommend WordTracker) and found some similar keywords that received tons of daily searches. I rewrote the title to incorporate those new keywords. Results? A dramatic increase in traffic for that page.

In sum, yes! Adjust your titles anytime that you find through keyword research that you are using keywords that draw few if any searches. Replace them with similar keywords that draw more searches.

As far as the Description meta tag, change it anytime you wish. The main reason you would want to change the description is that search engines will often (not always) use your Desciption meta tag for the little descriptive paragraph that they show below your link in the search engine results page. So you want to have an eye-catching description, one that will convince the surfer to click on your link.

 

I completely agree with you...

But here's my logic why I did it:

a) it was a test to see the effects of changing the title

b) i figure that if my site ranks higher for the word 'foremost', then logically, it'll rank higher for 'foremost furniture' or 'foremost vanities' (any thoughts on this? is that good/bad logic?)

 

I see what you are trying to do, but I would also ask why not focus on the keyword "furniture"? Would that not be far more benifical for you in the long run?

 

Agreed - but there's so much competition with the word 'furniture'. I mean, I have 300 backlinks, while everythingfurniture.com has 79,000... I just don't know how we would compete with that...

 

How do you feel about re-writing content just as you do for your titles? I was told that re-writing content is a bad idea, and rankings could drop.... but that doesn't really make sense to me.

In my opinion, I should be able to do keyword research, re-write some pages, wait a few weeks/months and I should see better SERP.

 

That doesn't make sense to me, either. I often update my home page, adding new links to new inner pages. It doesn't seem to hurt rankings at all. The internet is all about content, so it doesn't make sense that the search engines would penalize you for adding content, whether to an existing page or via a new page.