Take More Risks

OK let’s say that you have a blog that has a set title on the index page, for example “Buy Widgets Online. Great Widgets and Pink Widgets For Sale”. Your blog subsequently ranks well for “Buy Widgets Online” and “Pink Widgets For Sale” but you later encounter other keyphrases that you would like to rank for.

One option is to stuff the title with all of these key phrases. This will make the title appear messy and will devalue the weight that the other keywords in the title holds.

The other option is to change the titles of the next index page to target the desired keywords. By this I mean pages like http://www.takemorerisks.com/pages/2/ which show older posts from my blog.

As an experiment I drafted up some rough code in PHP which I placed within the header.php file of another website and I then tested it out.

$request = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if($request == "/blog/" || $request == "/blog/page/1/") {
$title = "Buy Widgets Online. Great Widgets and Pink Widgets For Sale";
}
elseif(strstr($request, "page/2")) {
$title = "Free Widgets, Widgets For Adults, Widgets For Children";
}
elseif(strstr($request, "page/3")) {
$title = "Blue Widgets, Widgets That Bark, Invisible Widgets";
}
else {
$title = the_title('','', false);
}

My question is, would this have any beneficial effect on SEO? We’re told repeatedly that key phrases placed within the title tag hold the greatest weight on a page, so surely we should at least rank for some of these keywords? What if we used a similar technique to automatically inject unique content onto these pages that was related to the keywords in the title?

Injecting a significant amount of content into these pages could help them bypass the most lenient of duplicate content filters but probably not Google. We could maybe combat this by limiting the number of posts that appear on each of the index pages but this could be overkill for such a potentially small reward.

It’s an interesting idea but one I haven’t much experience with yet. I’d appreciate your thoughts and or experiences with this!

Update : I’ve just found the SEO Title Tag Wordpress plugin which allows you to edit any of the titles on your blog, which might be useful for this.