Can Duplicate Title Tags Undo Your SEO Efforts

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

An intertesting article by Stoney deGeyter on smallbusinessnewz raises an interesting question when it comes to duplicate content and web design, title tags and search engine optimization. Many web designers, particularly when working to a limited budget, often create header and footer templates for their clients.

As a time saving practice this is fair enough. If you’re having ten pages created it sounds like good business sense to create templates that can then be filled with the relevant content individually. However, the header and footer can play an important role in search engine optimization programs. The last thing you need is to have your web design fight your efforts along the way.

To quote Stoney:

…I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. It will, however, have an effect on rankings, but that’s another discussion. Even still, it’s a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.

I quite agree on this issue. The more variation in page content the better. There are other issues at play here as well. Each page should be, to all intents and purposes, unique – and that includes the titles and any other meta data. There is a good chance that your web design has identical meta tags including the keywords meta tag. This is not good search engine optimization practice particularly as each page will most likely require a different set of keywords.

If you have pages that are product based, they will require different keywords along with a different title. These can be included in your web design if a little thought is given to your web design planning. Unique pages are standard search engine optimization practices. I wonder how many look at the tags as part of that uniqueness?

Having your web design work for you is half the battle when it comes to search engine optimization. Have you checked yours lately?