change title tags?

I've been in a similar position before and to be honest... sometimes you just need to take the risk and try out things on well ranked pages to look for more!

The fact that the company name is at the start of the title tag leads me to believe that there is room for improvement by repositioning the keywords within the title regardless. You will lose a certain amount of branding benefits by taking the company name out of the title and people will not see it as clearly within the SERPs as they previously would.

However, if you are careful with what you take out and put back in and don't change the keyword density within the title tag then it lessens the risk.

It's well worth keeping the old title tag on hand and revert back if you see negative results of the changes after a couple of weeks.

I wouldn't make any wholesale changes on this. You might pick one or two where you rank well, but not your top money words/sites, and try the changes. Once the pages have been re-crawled, watch the SEO results for about 4 weeks. Don't change anything else on those pages. If you start losing ranks, you might want to reconsider.

However, unless you are ranking heavily based on the company name or keywords in the company name, then removing it should draw increased attention to your primary keyword, as well as moving the primary closer to the front of the title tag. I'd think from the gut that this would be good. Just consider the impact of the keywords in the company name.

And test; always test.

Just make a sustainable number of high quality, relavent backlinks with your KW's as anchor text.

As for the titles if the site ranks very high currently there is allways a risk that if you change anything you will have an effect. But it could be positive as well as negative.

If the site is old and established it probably will rank for its brand terms regardless if the company name is in the title. You could replace it with a keyword at the front of the title but then that brings up a user experience that the company name is not displayed in the search results title.

How about having "keyword at brand name etc..." or something?

Oh yes just seen esdavis' post as I was writing the other. If your company name in fact includes your main keyword then leave well alone. If it ain't broke and all that!!

there are almost as many brand name searches per month as there are for the some of the keywords. so it would be nice to keep it at least on the homepage. I keep getting told of seo people that you don't need a certain kw on a page to rank for it, but I guess thats hard to achieve unless you have a lot of money to throw at seo. I'm not being paid much so can't buy any great links.

Hmm.. tricky one to decide on!!! I'm thinking of leaving the homepage as it is and trying changing the title on one of the other pages?

Also, nick you said not to change kw density, is increasing kw densite (by removing non-kw words) seen as a bad thing also?

People always say 'if its ranking well why change it', well sure its ranking well and they dont want to lose those rankings, but there's other related terms they want to rank for too.

HP title is:

company name ltd | xxx equipment | location1 | location2 | location3 | commercial xxx suppliers


they want to rank for a new location so not sure whether to just add it in title.

on another page they have:

company name ltd | xxx equipment | location1 | location2 | location3 | xxx equipment servicing

they want to rank for "xxx equipment servicing" AND "xxx equipment repairs". so not sure whether to just add in repairs to the title also? I'm thinking that would be too much, but then again I don't want to remove anything from it and damage existing rankings.

If I were to leave it I could probably drop "xxx equipment repairs" into the page content but then I would have a mammoth task on my hands trying to rank it.

Just checking on this - when you refer to the title are you referring to the Title Tag for the page or the H1 tag at the top of the page?

Because you can do a lot with your visible H1 tag, but you are limited to 65-70 characters (depending on the search engines) for your TITLE tag. That's about all the SERPs have room for to display. Your title tag seems awfully long here.

title tag as in the browser title, not the h1.

yeah it is pretty long, but since it is ranking well already and is so old, I'm not sure what to do.

No point me shortening the title if I'm choosing not to add the new keywords in also..

So if it's the title tag, you're pretty much limited to 65-70 characters. If you check your browser at the top where the title displays, you'll see you juts don't have much more room. Also, Google cuts it off in the SERPs because they can only display so many characters in the top line that is your TITLE. It uses the title tag for that, so longer than 70 characters most likely won't show, and it might look odd cut off.

If the full TITLE is showing in the SERPs, I'd be interested in seeing that, just for my curiosity. Would you be willing to share the keyword and domain name for a look-see?

why not create a new page, optimise to hell for the new keywords, link to that page from the root (home page), ping it, put it it sitemap, do some backlinking direct to the new page using achors with the new keyword and it should be indexed in no time.

that way you don't touch the exising titles etc.