Should I change the title of my site?

11 replies
  • SEO
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I have a site called Professional Social Promotion. Currently it is on page 2 of Google for social promotion.

I want to get on the first page, and I'm wondering if it's a good idea to change the actual title of the home page to social promotion?

I've made a lot of back links to it from the full title, will all of those still work the same if I change it, and will Google penalize me for changing the title?

If you think I should change the title, then what sort of link text should I use from the back links I've made, where I can change them?

I've heard it's a good idea to make back links from different link text, but how much of what?

I'm a little worried that if I change the title, it might mess up the algorithms that got me to the second page. Any advice?
#change #site #title
  • Profile picture of the author RevSEO
    Sure - why not? Is the term "professional" necessary?

    In terms of backlinks, no Google won't penalize you as a result of changing your title and the difference between your old links and new title. Keep in mind Google's already seen the links with the term social promotion in them, so you'll still see benefit from that anchor text even though Professional is there.

    Keep building content with and around the term social promotion and focus your linkbuilding efforts on the anchor text social promotion as well.

    Over time begin to blend in 2 - 3 different examples of anchor text broken down the following way for best results

    60 % - Social promotion
    20% - Professional social promotion
    20% - "ANOTHER KEYWORD"
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  • Profile picture of the author rowanman28
    It wasn't a good idea to change it, I lost one spot in the SERPs, I don't know if that will improve over time or not, or whether I should change it back. Any ideas on how to get a better ranking?
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  • Profile picture of the author rowanman28
    I'm really quite annoyed that I changed the title of my site. It was the first ever Wordpress site I've made, only a month old, and it was at the top of page 2 for a search on social promotion. That's really good. What you should have said was don't worry about changing the title, keep doing what you've been doing, and it will work it's way up there. This was a bad step backwards.
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  • Profile picture of the author rowanman28
    Yeah, I feel like the advice I'm getting isn't coming from people who have even looked at the site. SEO is changing all the time. I had a good ranking with Professional Social Promotion after a month, and changing it screwed up my whole plan, and the back links I'd already made. People comment too quickly here, and give advice too quickly without explaining the dangers involved in what they're saying. I have changed the title of my site back to Professional Social Promotion, because when I changed it to social promotion, it slipped down in the rankings, and I can't get any good advice here because it's from different people, only looking to make a quick comment for a back link in their signature. At least that's the way it seems to me. I can't get proper advice on SEO for my site here. I will go back to doing the things that worked to get me the ranking I had, which is pretty good for only a month with my first ever Wordpress site. Social promotion is a big keyword, and even if I had called the site social promotion from the start, I don't think I would be doing any better in that search.
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  • Profile picture of the author daniel69
    Hi Rowanman i would suggest you to continue with your work. Build more links with the anchor "social promotion". However i would not suggest you to change the anchor of all your back link as it may seems spam.

    Also Cadmo has suggested a few good ways to improve ranking.

    The drop in ranking that you think is because of a change in Title is temporary. Your site will come up with time. It would not take longer. Generally when you made any changes in Title, ranking may fluctuate slightly but it's not going to last longer. If you feel like you could use both the anchor text in your site title as Social Promotion, Professional social promotion service.

    One more thing, i found a minor mistake in your source code. In the heading "social promotion" you have used H2 tag while have closed H3 tag. Though its a minor mistake, but i thought to bring it to your notice.
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  • Profile picture of the author rowanman28
    Thank you, that was helpful information. I changed it back, and it's still being recognized as social promotion on Google, but now it's number 11, just one away from page one. That's probably because of the fresh content I added, and extra back links I made. The results on the first page don't all start with social promotion in the beginning of the title, I think that it's not something I should have worried about too much. In my experience, the longer you keep updating your site with quality content, the better it does in Google, and I think the exact match domain name title might be a different factor which could have it's own benefits. If I call my title professional social promotion, and it's URL is professionalsocialpromotion.com, that probably seems more professional to Google, and there are so many other factors, that I'm not going to bother thinking about it anymore, I'm just going to keep publishing good quality content, and gradually making back links.
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  • Profile picture of the author warrich
    Change it back to the previous version and continue with what you were doing with the submissions to the site. Hopefull you will see the rankings change in your favour.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeBarcus
      I noticed you mentioned this is a Wordpress site, are you using any kind of SEO plugin?

      I use a paid plugin but my buddy put me onto this free plugin that looks really good: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

      Taking a quick look at your site I see there are several things you could do to help rank higher.

      I highly suggest you give the plugin a try.

      Best of luck!
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      • Profile picture of the author theverysmartguy
        So I did some checking on your website:

        ranking for: professional social promotion : 1
        ranking for: social promotion: 7

        I checked 3 different places over a couple different google server clusters and those 2 rankings were what came up.

        So you are doing something right.

        However, I would advise changing the title just a bid. Make it more click friendly. So keep the keywords in the front, but make it so that it pops out on the searches.

        I checked your on page SEO, and it is pretty much perfect.

        I would just concentrate on more backlinks to make it rise further in the search engines.

        -- Jeff
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        "Doing nothing is worse than doing it wrong."

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  • Profile picture of the author HealthBuff
    Check your web site address in
    The W3C Markup Validation Service google et al just love clean sites

    go to fiverr.com - No cost to join. Check out programmers who can clean this up for you css codes
    Click programming then serach on Validate W3 to see who is doing this work. /HB
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    • Profile picture of the author Nero Arcnumé
      Originally Posted by HealthBuff View Post

      Check your web site address in
      The W3C Markup Validation Service google et al just love clean sites

      go to fiverr.com - No cost to join. Check out programmers who can clean this up for you css codes
      Click programming then serach on Validate W3 to see who is doing this work. /HB
      I wouldn't spend too much time or even just $5 to get a site perfectly validated. I mean, sure, run it through the validator to catch potential crawler breaking errors. But your site doesn't need to be perfect. Even Google's own +1 button breaks validation. Just make sure your content, meta tags, etc can be read by the GoogleBot.
      Signature

      I am Nero. Sup.

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