Title tag questions

[Dirty]

General title tag questions

1. how important is it not to change your title tag, I own a prom dress site and I'm always changing them between prom and homecoming'

2. Is it bad to have title tags that are only different by one word across thousands of pages on your site.  I have thousands of dresses so each title tag only varies by the style #

3. I have always had title tags that are for example black prom dresses, well i recently discovered that just black dresses is googled 10 times the amount so im debating changing them to black dresses so that the word dresses is closer to the front of the title tag, am I over reacting or is that a good idea or would it be bad to put black dresses, black prom dresses, black homecoming dresses

4. I also put the year in almost every title tag 2012, is that bad, I ranked great for 2012 stuff but could it hurt my homepage domain rankings on major broader keywords

[EGOL]

1) how important is it not to change your title tag, I own a prom dress site and I'm always changing them between prom and homecoming'

I believe that you can change it occasionally (a couple times a year) without adverse results.  However, I have experience with changing it frequently (every few days) and my pages seemed to be demoted.... but then original rankings came back when I stopped monkeying with it.

2) Is it bad to have title tags that are only different by one word across thousands of pages on your site.  I have thousands of dresses so each title tag only varies by the style #

I honestly think that you should put a little more work into this.  Do each of these thousands of dresses look identical?  No... so use your imagination to be more explicit - it might bring you more traffic because you will have diverse title tags.

Get provocative with some of these, get reserved with others, shout a value proposition in others.

Do this and see if it increases the total traffic into your site

3) I have always had title tags that are for example black prom dresses, well i recently discovered that just black dresses is googled 10 times the amount

If you can rank for the exact match query "black dresses" then go for it.  Otherwise include more restrictive adjectives that are relevant to the product.  I believe in a diversity of text in title tags, and product descriptions.  I think that it gives your entire site greater keyword reach.

4) I also put the year in almost every title tag 2012, is that bad, I ranked great for 2012 stuff but could it hurt my homepage domain rankings on major broader keywords

Go into your analytics to see if anybody is visiting your site as a result of placing the year in the title.  If yes then you might have a good thing.  If no, then use that space for something that might pull traffic.

Some final comments....  It is good that you are thinking about these things but I think that you can learn a lot and get firm answers to your questions by experimenting and carefully watching your analytics.

[Dirty]

how important are the first 2 words in a  title tag then, I can do what you said and make all my title tags different but I was afraid to b/c by doing a systematic approach  I make sure my manufacturer and product # are the first 2 words and that is how people google it but by doing so it does not lead to diversity.  But i rank page one for every single product so i get great traffic from long tail, but what Im afraid of is that google is hurting my broader search terms b./c it looks at my overall site and doesnt see enough diversity in title tags even though none are identical, is that true or does google just analyse keyword by keyword and doesnt let other pages effect SERP.  Heres the main question I guess that goes along with that, if im trying to rank high for prom dresses does it look at how many of my pages title tags have prom dresses in it to determine my overall prom dresses ranking for my homepage domain.

One side question is earlier I asked about doing black dresses, black prom dresses, black homecoming dresses as one title tag, im sure this is overkill for dresses but i need to get adjectives in but would black dresses for prom and homecoming give as much of a match with less keyword stuffing.

[EGOL]

But i rank page one for every single product so i get great traffic from long tail, but what Im afraid of is that google is hurting my broader search terms b./c it looks at my overall site and doesnt see enough diversity in title tags even though none are identical, is that true or does google just analyse keyword by keyword and doesnt let other pages effect SERP.

It sounds like you are doing quite well.  If you have a site about widgets google is going to expect a lot of title tags about different types, styles, colors and sizes of widgets.  I think that the same thing holds true for dresses.  I have lots of pages on my sites that are variants on a theme and they have title tags that are crafted similar to what you describe.

If it is working keep doing it.

I asked about doing black dresses, black prom dresses, black homecoming dresses as one title tag, im sure this is overkill for dresses but i need to get adjectives in but would black dresses for prom and homecoming give as much of a match with less keyword stuffing.

I might approach this at the "category" level.  I would have category pages for prom and homecoming.  Some dresses that might be worn to two different types of events might be listed on two category pages and receive a link from each of them with different anchor text.  That will help that product page rank for two different category terms.

Think about more category pages.  They can be powerful in the SERPs, present your products with different accessories and hit common product pages with various anchor text.

[sesertin]

Agreeing with Egol that if you are ranking well than something must be done right. If I had hierarhical categories maybe I would try to always link back to the upper category with the proper anchor, like if you have dresses -> prom dresses -> black prom dresses link bacj from black prom dresses to prom dresses with this anchor so that google knows that these are really two pages that need to be seperate however only differing in one word.

I once had a site where similarity of title tags came into play. It offered pizza for 23 districts and I tried with pizza deliverry 13th distirct than pizza delivery 14th district. Now that was obviously too little difference for google as 3-4 districts were displayed in the first few places of the serps, 10 were still on first page but the others were far left behind.

Look at the rankings for the pages with nearly the same title like black prom dresses and white prom dresses and pink prom dresses. If none of them is left far behind than titles are considered to be different.