Unique Title Better SEO

The past week has been pretty busy for me and I could not run any seo experiments, but the nature wanted so that I made a mistake that turned into a successful experiment on webpage titles and SEO. I have many times stated that Title is your most powerful SEO technique for the on-page search engine optimization.

Days ago the all in one seo pack plugin was deactivated on my xHTML coding website and since I did not used the seo title hack for wordpress when created the theme, the title of the blog and all inner pages was solely based on all in one seo pack. As the plugin was deactivated all the pages of the site had the same title tag as the homepage.

The xHTML Coding site was ranking very well for its own keywords (xhtml coding) and was on page one until the plugin didn’t deactivate and Google crawled the site and replaced all index pages with the same title. This change caused the site to suffer in search engine result pages and the search engine rankings were hurt heavy. The site was moved on page 6 of the Google SERPs (but thanks only to the keywords in the domain, otherways it would of end up much far). I was busy enough to work on clients site that I had totally forget to check my site and why the sudden drop of the organic traffic from search engines.

After I had located the problem I activated back the all in one seo pack plugin to get replaced the titles as they were supposed to be. It takes awhile for the new titles to be replaced in the SERPs of Google so I was patient but wanted to monitor how this will effect my search engine ranking. As the site was being crawled and the new titles took place in the SERPs the site started to rank again for its keywords and gradually climbing the SERPs. It is not in the same position as it was before but this must be just for the moment and it should take back its position soon.

One page One title

If there is anything you can learn from my mistake about search engine optimization (SEO) is that Google search engine loves unique and descriptive titles. As the titles are meant to give a name to pages (or sites) having the same title on multiple pages will definitively confuse the search engine spiders and you would be doing nothing else but hurting your search engine rankings.

Speaking about unique page needs a unique title to name the page I did notice that in WordPress we can have the so called “paged pages” of our homepage, category or archives. If you scroll down to the bottom on the homepage of SEO Optimization you will notice the paged pages menu which lead you to the page 2 of homepage than 3, etc.. At this moment I have 36 paged pages of the homepage, and if you surf on those pages you will notice that the title is the same as the one of the homepage. That means that my paged pages most likely confuse the search engine spider bots as which of the pages is the one that needs more attention from the search engines as well as those paged pages “compete” with the homepage for the same keyword.

If Google search engine is smart enough to determine which is the important page and that needs to compete for the keywords in my title other search engines such as MSN Search Engine or Yahoo search engine unfortunately are not that smart. In fact for the keywords SEO Optimization in MSN I am on page 6 and on that position I am not with my homepage but instead with my seo resources page, while on Yahoo search engine I am not ranking anywhere for the keywords SEO Optimization most probably because search engines like MSN and Yahoo consider the duplicate title of the paged pages as duplicate content and not considering the homepage at all.

To this issue I requested at uberdose (the author of All In One SEO Pack) to see if he can at least make it so the paged pages get a number before the title, example: homepage’s title: SEO Optimization | Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paged pages title: Page X of SEO Optimization (or any wanted keyword, i’d rather use the domain name tho). Hope that the new version of all in one seo pack will have this new feature included and help us bloggers to improve our SEO and search engine rankings.

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