Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should you include domain / brand in Meta Title
-
Hello,
I am trying to come up with a strategy for creating meta title information for my eCommerce store. I have read mixed reviews on the examples below. The first includes the company / brand in the meta title and thus is included in SE results. The second does not. Probably not a 'right' answer here so I look forward to answers with rationale... also open to a completely difference strategy all together!
1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - $Company_Name
OR
1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - Pre Workout Supplement
Thanks!
-
Yes !!!
I recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach. The differentiating factor is the strength and awareness of the brand in the target market. If a brand is well–known enough to make a difference in click–through rates in search results, the brand name should be first. If the brand is less known or relevant than the keyword, the keyword should be first.
Personally I think Brand on titles are good for the following
1. Brand Exposure (User point of view)
2. Reputation Management (Google point of view)Google also started putting many site's name in the title. I think the reason Google started doing it was to distinguish
many of the same titles in the SERPS. Lots of sites, me included, just put "Build Blue Widgets" in the title and the SERPS looked a bit silly with 5 of the top ten having the same title.Nowadays, if anybody searches for your brand and you don't have your brand name in your title tag, google ignores your hard coded Title Tag shows Brand name as your title Tag in its serp.
If Google wants to add site names to the title who am I to disagree with them.
P.S - However if you do your seo right and you rank on important keywords, everytime user searches in google and find you and see your brand on the google serp, you are spreading Brand awareness and you are building your brand for Free ! and gradually the user will know that this brand sells this product and then if you are not ranked on top the user will still click on your link. So you are killing two birds with one stone. Free Traffic + Free Brand building...
Happy Selling !
-
I came across this:
Nowadays Google includes your brand name automatically to the end of your title tag(if theres enough space), so it doesn't make any sense to include your URL in the title tag or description.
from this link: http://moz.com/community/q/url-domain-used-in-meta-description
Any validity to that?
-
A/B testing is always there, but I'm assuming the site is new and doesnt really have much traffic yet, I can't really say specifically answer that. So it's more of a preference as it's normally the one that brings in results for me more often than not. Then I'll test from there with the traffic/rankings/ctr.
Heck, I'll just imitate Zappos first if I need to then test from there. lol
-
Dennis,
Thanks for the reply. Is this because you have a/b tested and including was the better option? Or just preference?
-
There is no rule book for crafting titles except one and that is to create the titles that encourage users to click on the website plus after reading they get a clue of what they are going find in the website. The idea is to test different titles and see is working for you and your business.
I have experienced website that receives are better click ratio when the brand name was added and for few other websites the CTR goes higher as we remove the brand name from the title.
My advice for you is to test and see what works best for you!!
-
This is subjective but yes, I almost always opt to have the company brand in there.
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
-
Video titles and descriptions
Hi everyone, I have a question about embedding videos on a website: if you optimize the title and description for the video in Youtube, will these be taken into account for the ranking of the page where the video is embedded? Or will only the Youtube link for the video show in SERP's, instead of the page itself? I've read in a post of Phil Nottingham that it's usually not a good idea to embed a Youtube video on your own site, but use Wistia instead, exactly to avoid cannibalisation of your own rankings. Is this correct? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1 -
Meta Keywords: Should we use them or not?
I am working through our site and see that meta keywords are being used heavily and unnecessarily. Each of our info pages will have 2 or 3 keyword phrases built into them. Should we just duplicate the keyword phrases into the meta keyword field, should put in additional keywords beyond or not use it at all? Thoughts and opinions appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus1