Hone your SEO skills... Titles

I answered all the threads I could and have a few minutes to spare so I thought I would have a rant about my latest "pet peeve"... terrible thread titles.
Quite honestly I begrudge the time it takes me to fix them!
<rant>
This is an SEO forum so we should expect everybody who posts here to at least take an interest in SEO... Right?

As an absolute minimum we should expect thread titles to describe the topic.
Better still would be titles which will - eventually - give the forum some tasty serps to help draw in more visitors.
Best of all would be a thread title which achieves both of the above, AND attracts the maximum number of visitors to take a look.

So - when I see thread titles like:

Where?
Why is this happening?
Please Help.
Newbie needs help.
Question.
SEO question.
etc etc...

I am forced to wonder if the poster gives the same lack of thought to their site KW's and SEO...

I see little point in optimising a site for such terms as "Website about stuff"

C'mon people - get with the program
</rant>

lol... You are a true gem ClickyB...You are one of those that make this forum a fun place to hang around.....

Thanks Gazz

I think we all have been guilty of this at one time or another. But you still have a very valid point.

I would have to assume new users looking for the quick fix for all their SEO related issues, questions, and tasks make up the 90% of users who create topics such as these.

Why not add a clearer definition for forum topics under the posting guidelines and then hold the users accountable when it is not followed.

Better created forum topics also helps all users. Especially in terms of using the forum search as the title will be more descriptive providing more weight and better search results for the term being used. Again simple SEO rules apply here as well.

If you can't write a great title for a thread here I'll bet the title tags on your website really suck.

This issue keeps coming back...

I've linked to this thread once or twice recently but I keep having to search it out again to do so...

So - unless any my "mod colleagues" has any objections - I have "Stickied" it.

This thread should have been made sticky long back.

Anyways, hope that people will SEE this thread before creating threads and get with the program

Stop preaching people about title tags and other stuff ;)
....even ur post has some serious validation errors....
to my knowledge<rant>......</rant> is a illegal html syntax

Apparently it's being introduced in the XHTML 2.0 specifications
(mainly by those that have read and tried to understand the existing XHTML 2.0 specs!)

Damn - they parsed my (perfectly legal) tags and spoiled the whole joke

I'd also add that it's worthwhile, at the same time, honing your SEO skills at determining relevancy. Posting in the wrong forum shows a distinct lack of this.

Pagerank questions should go in the Pagerank forum, Google specific optimization questions in the Google optimization forum, etc etc

I've lost track of the number of threads I've moved recently

1. Unfortunately those who could learn from this post will never read it.

2. I'm damn glad you are a moderator and not me because I would have 86ed about 80% of the people who post here by now. So you are adding a lot more value than it appears on the surface.

3. Rant away! I would hate to have to raise my hand to be a moderator. So personally....I'm all EARS! LOL!

As a newbie - I thought this thread was going to tell us about Title tags

I'm glad you spotted the difference between Titles and <Titles>...



In a way it does... (it's good training).

And you see...
it works


Incidentally... if you search Google for: allintitle:"home page" you'll see that some 16million web pages use "Home Page" in their home page title tag

If you think this is bad, go to AbestWeb.com, where you sometimes get titles like "Earn $15,000/week from home"