Which keyword for title

[clayknight]

I'm trying to figure out what to use for my title text. It's for a structural steel fabrication company. Adwords has the average monthly searches for "structural steel" and "steel fabrication" identical at 5,400. It has "structural steel fabrication" at 390 which I get that since its longer and a little more specific will have less searches. My question is if I make the title "structural steel fabrication" does google just see it as 1 big keyword or will it rank for "structural steel" and/or "steel fabrication"? What would any of you go with here? All 3 keyword strings make sense for the person seeing the title.

Thanks for any advice you can give,

Clay

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Clay. Google will be able to parse your page meaning not only from the Title Text but also the semantic linking to and from your page, so "structural steel fabrication" should be a fine choice.  Something that could help you test the efficacy of your title tags though would be to start up a small paid campaign (AdWords) around the company brand and then split test the various titles you come up with amongst people searching specifically for the company brand.  Then you'll have data on which title tends to beat out the other from a CTR stand point.

[Lumina]

Search engines will see "Structural Steel Fabricator" as one keyword, not as all combinations of words therein.

When it comes to short vs long-tail keywords, the main question is about whether or not the loss of searches is made up for by specificity in regard to longer keywords. For example: let's say your business is home construction. In 1 day, 1,000 people search "construction" on Google, whereas 200 people search "home construction". While "construction" gets 5x the visits to your site, it's assumed that those who visit from searching "home construction" will be more likely interested in your service because they were more specific and therefore, your service is more tailored to their search.

Odds are that less people will generally search "home construction", but there's also less competition and the leads are more likely to become customers. So, I suggest comparing your conversion rates, the amount of visitors for both, and the competition for each keyword.

[Chris.Menke]

Clay,

As far as the words used in the title, those that are closest together and closest to the beginning of title will be given more weight but there is no clear delineation of what's a keyword and what's not a keyword in the title. Rather, think of your title as a lens through which  Google sees the rest of the words on your page.

When the copy on the page contains the same words in the same order as what's found in the title, such combinations will be seen by google as highly relevant to the same combination used in a search query. In your example, if your tile contains only "steel fabrication"  and your page copy contains only "steel fabrication" then the page would be far more relevant to the "steel fabrication" search query than it would be to the "structural steel fabrication" search query.

If your title used "steel fabrication" towards the beginning and "structural" towards the end and you sprinkled the terms "structural" and "steel fabrication" throughout your page copy, the page would still be highly relevant to the search query "steel fabrication", while increasing in relevance to the "structural steel fabrication"  query.

If your title began with "structural steel fabrication" and you used that combination of words throughout your copy, the page would probably become more relevant to that query than to "steel fabrication" but could possibly still rank for both.

That said, there is a fundamental difference between the concepts of "structural steel fabrication" and "structural steel " (and "steel fabrication" for that matter) and Google is recognizing that the way each is used in context gives big clues to the page concepts.  Thus, more and more, Goolge knows that just because the words "steel fabrication" are used next to each other on a page, if structural is used in front of them, then the page may be considered irrelevant to "structural steel fabrication".

So, if your page is about "structural steel", use your copy to clearly this product or service. If the page is about "steel fabrication" use the page copy to clearly describe that service to your visitors.  If the page is about "structural steel fabrication", be clear about that. Doing so will pay off more and more, as Google continues to get better at providing search results and as visitor expectations of landing pages get higher.

[Anti-Alex]

As mentioned above just setting the title to the most popular keyword won't guarantee you rank for that keyword. You're better off creating a page that uses and supports both keywords, or target a good keyword for your brand. Follow up by creating sub pages or sub content that support the 2 keywords you've mentioned. The goal isn't to just use the keyword in a few places, it's to create a whole map of content that supports a single keyword.

[clayknight]

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[clayknight]

Thanks a lot Chris! That really helps me out. Being a developer who's boss told him to "figure out SEO" this stuff gets pretty confusing sometimes. I appreciate it.

[clayknight]

Thanks for the response Alex. I'm really starting to get a grasp on this stuff. Appreciate it!

[KeriMorgret]

Could you give a little more background about how the SEs would view that as just one keyword? I'm looking at a search for SEO in Google right now, and on the front page there are results including one with SEO Training in the title tag, yet it's showing up on the first page for SEO by itself.

For the construction example, the number of searches isn't necessarily the number of visits to a page. On my site, I show up fairly low for just "warship" but fairly high for "model warship combat". Way more people search for "warship", but I'm so far down in the results for that keyword that I get more visits from "model warship combat" even though there's far less search volume. Like you said, the longer-tail keywords are often the ones that do convert better.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Clay,

Welcome to Moz! Have you checked out the Beginner's Guide to SEO as well as our other guides at http://moz.com/learn/seo? I totally understand if you've instead been enjoying the weather! I see you're in AG/SLO. I grew up in Santa Maria, and really am only now (after relocating to Seattle) appreciating the weather we had there in the winter.