A good META title for a front page....
-
Hi,
We recently asked for some pointers to use on our site bit.ly/4Cogch as one of our SEOmoz private questions. One of the points that was picked up was that the title of the homepage looked quite spammy:
Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner
I completely see this however I've checked out our competition and no one seems to be doing things any better and the SEOmoz On Page SEO tool seems to like it so I'm not sure what changes to make.
Does anybody have any inspiration that I could possibly use? It was suggested that Google is quite brand focused and so I should integrate the company name but how else would you change things, bearing in mind the ink and toner market that we're focusing on?
Thanks for your help!
Chris
-
Of course all title tags should be unique and main keyword should target that product so if you have a section about laser cartridges it might be something like this
Main Laser Page (general)
Buy Laser Printer Cartridges | Toner Cartridge in Color and Black Ink
Laser Product Page (more specific)
Xerox 2030xp Laser Printer Cartridges | Color Ink Toner Cartridge
-
Hi Chris, sorry for not getting back sooner.
I think you can be confident that Google will recognise your brand name if its included in all of your titles. Case in point, if you look at the SEOMoz site - 'SEOMoz' is repeated on pretty much every page, of which there must be hundreds of thousands.
-
Lovely, thanks again buddy - Very much appreciated
-
If the name of your site is your brand name there should be no need to waste valuable title tag space, because with the name in the domain and a few times in the page content you should rank for that already.
-
That's cool. It did seem odd including my brand since we are a small company however the advice given in the private question was specifically to include the brand name. Unless there are any advances I'm going to change the title now as per Irving's advice to:
Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers
Thanks again for your help guys.
-
I think when it comes to branding you have access your business aims, industry, current keyword performance and competition.
A lot of people will drop it in the meta title and say "its for branding" without understanding what the impact will be.
Ask yourself would having my brand name in the meta title encourage a branded search the second time round?
How well do people know my brand?
Would i generate more sales from a higher search position because of a shorter Meta title tale?
Unless you are dealing with a national retailer, I'd focus on high traffic keywords for the homepage and then optimize the rest of your keyword targets through better landing pages.
-
Here are title tag best practices straight from SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag that may help.
-
Many thanks Irving; that's spot on.
One question, would you suggest leaving off our brand name entirely?
Thanks again.
-
a) Don't repeat any keyword more than once
b) If inkjet and laser are different those should have their own landing pages
c) I doubt cheap is as valuable as you think
Original: Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner Updated: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> Notice a singular and plural instance of "cartridges" and also a singular and plural "printers" which is probably an important keword missing. Also we still get "buy" "ink" "toner" "inkjet" and "Laser" in the title Also reads better
-
Many thanks Tom. With regards to the Brand Term would you suggest my company name or some brands that we stock - I'm guessing the former but I'm thinking if this gets included on more than a couple of pages I could suffer duplication issues.
In my mind this seems unspammy and unlikely to conflict with other page titles such as 'Toner Cartridges' and 'Inkjet Cartridges'. I would also plan to leave the company name off of any other titles.
Low Cost Printer Cartridges | Refresh Cartridges
It does seem very untargeted however.
-
How about:
Cheap Inkjet printer cartridges & laser toner ink cartridges
It is hard to figure out a non spammy title when you want to advertised many similar things in your title. But the above seems ok and naturally written to me.
All the best
-
There's a couple of things I'd take issue with this title.
First of all, as you mentioned, I'd want to include a brand term.
Second, the title is 79 characters - the general consensus is that you should limit your title to 70 characters, as any more might either be abbreviated by Google in the SERPs, or even replaced altogether by Google, which will then pick what it thinks is the most appropriate title. Source.
Third, by having that many keywords, you're diluting the 'strength' you would get from it. By limiting to 1 or 2 keywords, more of a 'focus', as it were, would be attributed to those keywords. Furthemore, you could then optimise internal pages of the site with the other keywords, which in turn could help build up overall domain authority if you choose to link-build to those pages.
Fourth, there is a case that this could be seen as over-optimisation by Google. And we all know what over optimisation might lead to in the future.
I wouldn't worry about what your competition is doing. The title tag's strength has been weakened over the years, but having a particularly spammy one could do more harm than good in the future. I would focus on two keywords at the most per page, and as I mentioned earlier, this means you could optimise internal pages for the other term, which in turn could build domain authority.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pages with Duplicate Content
When I crawl my site through moz, it shows lots of Pages with Duplicate Content. The thing is all that pages are pagination pages. How should I solve this issue?
Technical SEO | | 100offdeal0 -
How Often Can I Change My Meta Titles? (Product Discounts)
Hello, I have an ecommerce website. Due to discounts and sales on most of my products, the discount rates change very often. Some products have %10 discounts for 3 days and then same products might have %50 discounts for another 5 days. I would like to show these product specific discounts on Meta Titles and Descriptions dynamically. My system will automatically update the Meta Titles once the discount on a product changes. My question is, how often can I change the Meta Titles? Is changing them (only discount rates = 1word) too often bad for my SEO? What is Goolge's approach on this? Thank you in advance for all your help. Best,
Technical SEO | | yigitgok
Yigit0 -
Site Crawl -> Duplicate Page Content -> Same pages showing up with duplicates that are not
These, for example: | https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_campaign=july15&utm_medium=organic&utm_source=blog | 1 | 2 | 29 | 2 | 200 |
Technical SEO | | writezach
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.145821812.1573134750.1440742418 | 1 | 1 | 25 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=brightpod-article | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=marketplace&utm_campaign=homepage | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=first-3-must-watch-videos | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.159789566.2132270851.1418408142 | 1 | 5 | 31 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_source=vocus&utm_medium=PR&utm_campaign=52release | Any suggestions/directions for fixing or should I just disregard this "High Priority" moz issue? Thank you!0 -
My client is using a mobile template for their local pages and the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions
So my client has 2000+ different store locations. Each location has the standard desktop location and my client opted for a corresponding mobile template for each location. Now the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions. However this is only because the mobile template and desktop store pages are using the exact same title/meta description tag. Is Google penalizing my client for this? Would it be worth it to update the mobile template title/meta description tags?
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Is <title>different from <h1> and "meta tag title"?</title>
hi guys, new to MOZ and SEO. Basic question here. is <title>different from <h1> and "meta tag title"?</p> <p>I have lots of "title missing or blank" errors as reported by a recent Moz crawl. What do i need to add into the pages to clear these? an <h1>? an <title>? or <meta tag title>? </p> <p>Im running a volusion site, and from what ive read (negative & positive) Volusion can be a pain to optimize my SEO as i dont have full access to all my pages.?</p></title>
Technical SEO | | Jerrion0 -
Need for a modified meta-description every page for paginated content?
I'm currently working on a site, where there url structure which is something like: www.domain.com/catagory?page=4. With ~15 results per page. The pages all canonical to www.domain.com/catagory, with rel next and rel prev to www.domain.com/catagory?page=5 and www.domain.com/catagory?page=3 Webmaster tools flags these all as duplicate meta descriptions, So I wondered if there is value in appending the page number to the end of the description, (as we have with the title for the same reason) or if I am using a sub-optimal url structure. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages0 -
Why is google not deindexing pages with the meta noindex tag?
On our website www.keystonepetplace.com we added the meta noindex tag to category pages that were created by the sorting function. Google no longer seems to be adding more of these pages to the index, but the pages that were already added are still in the index when I check via site:keystonepetplace.com Here is an example page: http://www.keystonepetplace.com/dog/dog-food?limit=50 How long should it take for these pages to disappear from the index?
Technical SEO | | JGar-2203710 -
On page optimisation: Good for the users and engines?
I would like to rank for words as:
Technical SEO | | madsurfer
windsurfing equipment
windsurfing news
windsurfing sails
windsurfing boards etc. Now am I wondering if I should use exact those words in the navigation/titles/descriptions because it seems not user friendly. The whole website is about windsurfing thus naming it just “equipement” instead of “windsurfing equipment” would be clear to a visitor that I am talking about that windsurfing related topic. Here is an example: http://madwindsurfing.com/cat/competitions-events/
I can even change the URL to http://madwindsurfing.com/cat/windsurfing-competitions-events/ What would be the best way of choosing the naming/descriptions when I do on-page optimisation which is good for the engines and for the users and who would you do in my case?0