Hi all, I was wondering if anyone could advise me on the following... I have a site that sells technical books and have a large number of pages indexed by Google. I generate the page titles using php from search terms used on the site plus some standard bumph - in the format " 'Search terms' books from mysite". My question is, I want to change the standard bumph part (the latter) of the title to better incorporate a target keyword but, by doing so, will that effect the indexed pages or cause me problems with Google in other ways? The actual page URL's will not alter - only the title so I'm assuming not...but Any thoughts friends?
If it ain't broke don't try to fix it! That would be my advice. Adding additional keywords to the title tag might be considered SPAM by Google. You said your site is indexed well so I would leave it alone.
I have not changed a title in a couple of years. Back before the Florida update I changed several and saw a change in indexing within a week but back then the title seemed to have greater influence on the algorithm. Putting keyword phrase first as you currently have it looks like a pretty good idea to me.
You want the best title possible. If you have a page about flying small blue widgets, you want your page title to be precisely "Flying Small Blue Widgets" and not some autogenerate same exact page title for every page that you usually get with dynamic sites. The page title, other than links, is the most important ranking factor for your page. If your not utilizing your page titles properly than you are loosing out on alot of traffic. Do it, do it now. Leave your domain name out if possible, just use that pages title and nothing else. I've changed page titles on a bunch of sites I've optimized, what usually happens is after a few days the rankings drop and after a couple weeks they come back stronger then they have ever been.
Changing your titles is a risk, especially how often Google is NOT spidering sites these days...but if you don't try it, we won't know what happens ;-)
I have actually changed my title about 3 times because I was not too sure which keywords I should pick. I researched for best keywords later on and I decided to change. But this was before Bigdaddy, so I think I didn't get any penalty. I am not sure now how Bigdaddy acts for such changes. Frequent change in the Title is usually not good. But If you must change, it may be better to change it now.
Thanks for your thoughts, you have given me plenty to think about:..: I see it's not thought a good idea to have the site name in the title. That, at the moment at least, is a part of the 'bumph' I mentioned so I'll remove that. The dynamic portion of the titles are all unique (and reader friendly) so I will leave them as is. I will report back with the outcome and, if it all goes south maybe Monks can put me up - I hear San Diego is great this time of year - while I start from scratch :; Thanks for your time everyone, your advice is valued very much.