Hey Jill, how are you?

I have a quick question about a client's web site. It's for a site that sells gifts from recycled, reused and natural materials.

RE: the Title tags for gift suggestion pages. Should it say Gifts under $25, Gifts over $50, or should we say what the gifts are and not mention price, which might scare or annoy some people?

Thanks in advance,

Ilise


~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Ilise,

Since the Title tag is given so much weight in the search engines, you should use whatever keyword phrases you're optimizing the page for. So if you're optimizing the page for "gifts under $25" then you should use that one in the Title tag. If people are actually searching for that phrase, then having it in the Title tag will help the page to show up in the results. Those people will be more apt to click on your page, because it will obviously have what they're looking for.

I decided to do some quick Wordtracker research out of curiosity and came up with these numbers for similar kinds of phrases ("gifts under" and "gift suggestions"):

Ct, Predict, Keyword
29, 26, gifts under $10
26, 23, gift suggestions
15, 13, gifts under $20.00
8, 7, gifts under $20
7, 6, gifts under $25
5, 4, gifts baskets under $25.00
5, 4, gifts under $5.00

So there are *some* searches being done on those types of phrases; not a lot, but some.

Regarding the "gifts over" types of phrases, according to Wordtracker, people just aren't searching that way, which makes sense intuitively, also.

For fun, I tried looking up keyword phrases having to do with recycled materials and that sort of thing. Without really knowing what types of gifts your client is selling, it's difficult to choose keyword phrases, but there are a few phrases that get searched on having to do with recycled stuff. For instance, if you're selling "homemade recycled products," that is actually an okay keyword phrase with a Wordtracker count of 41. (Nothing great, but better than the "gifts under" keywords.)

I would suggest spending a day at Wordtracker to seek out all the related phrases you can, then write your copy based around the best, most relevant ones, and create your Title tags accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Jill

P.S. If you are totally confused by Wordtracker or choosing keyword phrases in general, I highly recommend that you contact Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs and outsource this aspect of your SEO campaign to them.