Advanced Title Tags

[CsmBill]

Looking for some advanced help here. I've been reading a lot of conflicting information on this, and I am hoping someone can clear this up.

My question is regarding length and complexity of title tags. For example, my top level keywords are:

IT Support, IT Services, IT Outsourcing, Help Desk, etc.

I also have pages for many modified versions ex: IT Support Services, Managed IT Services, etc.

I have robust pages for each. Should my title tag be:

IT Support | CSM Corp. - Simple

IT Support Company | CSM Corp. (Picks up a longer tail)

or

IT Support | Secondary Keyword | CSM Corp.

Does adding secondary keywords dilute the strength of the primary keyword?

If long is preferable, can someone give me an example using "IT Support"?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

You probably have already done this, but do you have any keywords that are more actionable?  Such as "IT Service Reviews?"  I just did a few quick searches for those high level keywords, and they keep producing research based results (i.e. Wikipedia, etc).

Anyway, the best tactic is to take a look at the top 5-10 prospects for your specific vertical, and see what they are doing.  If they you can find a pattern in those title tags, then you can determine your strategy based on that.

[GuillermoOrtiz]

Rahul,

I've found that using too many keywords in the title tag will dilute the main keyword, but the jury is out on that one whether it's 100% true.

Are you running a ppc campaign? PPC campaigns will often reveal the magic keyword that converts the best. Once you have this data, you can experiment with variations of the term to form the best possible title tag that revolves around conversions rather than traffic.
Jerry also has a good point about looking to see what competitors are targeting. They wouldn't be targeting those keywords if they weren't profitable

[jesse-landry]

In your AdWords account, don't forget to use the Keyword Tool.

It isn't the end-all be-all, but it will definitely get you on the right path.

P.S. I looked up your site and I just want to add a bit of criticism from a user's standpoint (please take it in the spirit in which it is intended.): All your graphics on that front page banner are... blurry. Get 'em high-res if you can cause it hurt my eyes to look at and I'm sure I won't be the only one bothered by that. Not trying to be a jerk, just trying to be helpful.

[CsmBill]

No offense taken. They are high res. The slider is blurring them. Should I reduce the size of the slider?

[AWCthreads]

Hi Rahul,

If your slider if 800px wide and 400px tall for example, make your images and art the exact same size.

Downsizing a 1000px wide image to 800px wide will maintain crispness.

Upsizing a 600px wide image to 800px wide will blur it.

If your images and art are typically smaller than your slider, reduce the size of your slider to accommodate your content.

[CsmBill]

Can you clarify? I am using Layer Slider, which uses a mix of text and graphics. You can see it at www.csm-corp.com. The sliders are generally 250 high, and the images (people) started off at 300 high. They needed to be scaled down to fit, and they don't encompass the whole slider.

What am I doing wrong?

[ThompsonPaul]

It looks to me like you need to increase the size of the images, Rahul. The images' dimensions are smaller than the way they are being rendered in the slider, which means the slider is having to up-size them to display. Up-sizing an image like that always makes it more blurry as data must be interpolated. (Doing this up-sizing in an image editor like PhotoShop will always be higher quality, but even then some blur is inevitable).

Best to redo the images from their originals at the size the slider is actually using them.

Paul

NOTE! Image resolution has nothing to do with how images will display on the web. Image dimensions (height and width in pixels) are the only thing that matters.

[ThompsonPaul]

Your figures are off, Rahul. Using the example of the IT Group photo ( the men & women standing in the middle of the hallway of servers-first image) the slider image is 337 pixels high, but the image file feeding it is only 250px high.

So the image is being up-sized by over 30%. That amount of upscaling will blur any image. Need to go back to the original image and recreate a new image for the slider that is 337 pixels high (or whatever the slider is actually using - I just used a rough on-screen ruler for my measurements so could be off a couple of pixels)

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

AHA! Figured it out. You're using a responsive slider, Rahul. That means the slider (and its images) get resized depending on the size of the browser window.

Those of us seeing blurry images are using a larger browser window, causing the images to be up-sized and going blurry.

To get around this, you're going to have to use larger images for the slider to keep the bigger browser windows sharp. (This is one of the classic tradeoffs of responsive design - the files sizes actually have to be bigger, even though they may get displayed on a small phone.

You'll need to arrive at a happy medium, and your analytics can help here. Ideally, you want to check the average browser window size for desktop users, but that takes some extra customization  Instead, at leas look at the average screen size of your desktop users and make an estimate of the typical browser window they use. Then check what size the slider images are for those screen sizes. Then redo the images to look crisp at that size. Compress them as much as possible while still maintaining quality, so you don't kill the file size.

That way, small screens will get the image as compressed as possible, but large screens will still see a large enough version of the image to be crisp.

Hope that makes sense?

Paul

[jesse-landry]

Paul is like the cleanup hitter. We all get on base and he drives em home.