In the never ending quest to attain #1 placement for certain terms, is it acceptable to change the title of your page (either often or rarely) to gain rankings and to specify the terms for which you want to post? I have a site that I am looking to move up for certain terms (at the expense of others, but that is okay) and I wanted to know what affect this has as a result.
changing often is definately good ... for example if you might want to optimize for certain times of year Xmas or Easter if u got a shop .... NFL or MLB and so forth if u got a sports website. Though your main target keywords are more than likely gonna be still the same ... including the additional seasonal terms would be a good, positive reason for changing your title page often. So yes its definately acceptable.
Your question supposes that the title is going to get you ranked highly for the keywords in it. I agree that the title is the most important on-page items, but I don't think changing the title without changing all your anchor text to match is going to do you any good. Again, supposing that you are in some mildly competitive market place. Rather than jerking the title around, my inclination would be to add another page optimized for the term you want, and then get a bunch of backlinks to it with the appropriate anchor text. If you do this correctly then you can rank for both search terms.
Good call compar, I guess I should just have a few pages that are keyed for the certain terms and phrases I want. I didn't want to optimize for the search engine at the expense of clients, but I can do both....
I'd probably stick with the same title, just because of the delay involved. I doubt it would hurt you significantly to change it once in a while though.
Google seems to be changing the search results based on titles quite frequently. Changes on my index pages are represented in the search results within 1 to 2 days.
Changing is good because it is seen as fresh content. However, you don't want to go too far or may hurt the benefits of existing rankings.
Never change the ttle of a ranking page, you will be out of the serps (atleast for short time). Its ok, if the page don't rank but I have seen pages getting disappeared from #8 position to oblivion when the title got changed.
It's depends upon the crawler frequency to arrive at ur website if it's fast and very frequent and you can see the changes you made within a day or so then you should change it twice in a week at least otherwise once in a month in better but be consistent with your changes there was a time when I used to change it after 3 month minimum but SEO have move forward since last one year so need to update your tags after every two weak. But If you are getting good results let them be as they are if your SERP's dropping then change them