First a little background. I have a website in Wordpress that was created a couple of years ago by a website builder who created it with a custom theme. I rarely go in and make changes and practically never edit any code in my "files". It has been ranking well for me locally. I just recently went in to change some SEO stuff and noticed that my SEO plug-in that I had in the past was missing. So I have just installed the plug-in http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/ and am going through page by page and updating Keyword Phrases, my Titles and Meta Descriptions. My first issue is with the formatting of the Titles. I used to have my Titles formatted like this: Home Page =Home | Another Page = Another Page | Back then my web person said I did not have to put any text after that little line . . . * Question 1: Should I continue to keep it that way or write new titles that I prefer to show up on the search results page. * Question 2: If I do add text should I keep the name of the page and that little line in the title with the text I want to add after it? When I do searches I notice some ppl doing this in their titles and some ppl don’t. Just wondering if it is just a formatting preference or if it actually helps with something. * Question 3: Will updating all titles make me loose ranking Thank you. https://www.chromehorserentals.com/
Drop the "Home |" It's lame looking and serves no purpose Go for "Chrome Hogs" well "Chrome Hog Rentals, Chrome Horse Rentals, Chrome Chopper Rentals or anything other than "Home |" It's late, but no you don't need that "Home |" stuff & that's certain - & I could tell you more but already I tempt you to get a little bit too over direct than most would say perhaps (and that's just a quick well this would be better than you have at least type of thing).. Make all pages different and targeted right (to correspond to page content) accordingly of course
Optimally, your titles should be formatted similar to this: Your Target Keyword | CHR Here is some awesome text about Your Target Keyword and what this article is about. https://www.chromehorserentals.com/your-target-keyword/ I would probably abbreviate the website name because it's so long in the titles or remove it completely.
thank you for the replies. But for my question #3 and probably most important. Will updating/changing all my titles make me loose ranking? I read somewhere (although an article from 2007) that if you change all your titles search engines will think that you are a new site and will take long to get back to where your were. Does that still hold true?
Yes, they will probably re-index your pages. But, if your site was poorly optimized before and you're properly optimizing it now and using highly relevant keywords for your content pages (Google values relevancy), chances are, once all your pages are re-indexed and everything has settled, you will get more traffic than you are currently. This, of course, also depends on how competitive the keywords are that you're targeting on your pages (and other factors). For example, if you were ranking well with a page for "Harley Davidson Cruiser Rentals" and changed everything to focus on the keyword "Cruiser Rentals," the new keyword is likely more competitive and harder to rank for than the more specific long-tail keyword. Hope that helps.