Hierachy in a Title Tag Needed?
-
When coding the title tags of a website, is it important to note the hierarchy of the website so the search engine can find that page? So, for example, the title tag would be, for a subcategory:
Webpage Subcategory>Category>Website name
Does this help the search engine rankings at all? Or can the search engines figure out the hierarchy by reading a sitemap or the HTML readable navigation? Then you could focus on the descriptive keywords of the subcategory page for the title tag.
Also, should you always include the site name in the title tag?
-
My pleasure !!
Cheers.
-
Thanks Rob!!
-
My testing has not shown any improvements with regards to this effort - BUT you could try it, and share the results with the rest of us!
Best practice for SEO TITLES is something like:
Optimal Format
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary KeywordSee this article on from the Moz team and a pretty good read too!
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag or
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Cheers! Rob
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
-
Do href lang tags need to be implemented at blogpost level?
Hey guys, Our site targets multiple territories. We use subfolders and hreflang tags on the site (built in WordPress) at a page level. We've added our hreflang tags manually in the section of each page. We're just re-doing the blog and we want to know if we need to add these tags to each individual blog post and if we do, how we would do it? Our developers have put them in at blog landing page level and told us that this will be fine. E.g.: /de/blog/ /gb/blog/ /uc/blog/ They have a slight tendency to push back on things though, and we just want to be sure we're doing this right. Hreflang tags are sooooo complicated so hoping you fine people can shed some light on the issue. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Twetman0 -
Duplicate/ <title>element too long issues</title>
I have a "duplicate <title>"/"<title> element too long" issue with thousands of pages. In the future I would like to automate these in a way that keeps them from being duplicated AND too long. The solution I came up with was to standardize these monthly posts with a similar, shorter, <title>, but then differentiate by adding the month and the year of the post at the end of each <title>. Hundreds of these come out every week, so it is hard to sit there and come up with a unique <title> every time. With this solution the <title> tags would undoubtedly be short enough, however my primary concern is, would simply adding the month and year at the end of each <title> be enough for Google/Moz to decide it is not a duplicate? How much variation is enough for it not to be deemed a duplicate <title>? </p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Meta Tags (again)
Hey, I know this has been discussed to death but look back through previous postings there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the exact Meta tags that an eCommerce site should include, specifically whether to remove the keyword tag or not since it is believed that Yahoo potentially still makes use of it. Currently our homepage has the following Meta Tags: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" /> Keywords" content="<a class="attribute-value">ink cartridges, cheap cartridges, inkjet cartridges, inkjet ink cartridges, ink cartridge, printer ink cartridges, laser cartridges, toner, laser printers</a>" /> Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/> author" content="<a class="attribute-value">Ink Cartridges, Inkjet Cartridge, Printer Cartridge, Toner Cartridges Refresh Cartridges</a>" /> expires" content="<a class="attribute-value">0</a>" /> robots" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp,index,follow</a>" /> Language" content="<a class="attribute-value">English</a>" /> Cache-Control" content="<a class="attribute-value">Public</a>" /> verify-v1" content="<a class="attribute-value">sJXqAAWP6ar/LTEOMyUgG6nqothxk62tJTid+ryBJxo=</a>" /> viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" /> This is too messy but before I do something drastic that I'll possibly regret please can you confirm that, in your opinion, I am best to remove everything with the exception of this: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" /> Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" /> I realise there is a verify-v1 tag in there but this can be done through a file on our server so while cleaning up that might as well go. Would there be an argument for keeping any of the other tags or are they all pretty much redundant now? Many thanks! Chris0 -
Changing meta title dynamically e.g. with number of reviews in title. Is this a problem?
I would like to put the number of reviews in the meta title of a product page. I noticed that tripadvisor for example does the same. However I read in some places that people encountered problems with frequent title tag changes. Did you ever encounter problems by just changing numbers in title tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Do you think it is really a problem if just the number of the reviews changes? what about putting number of reviews in the meta description instead?0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??
Hi, This is a new one to me ?! I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site. Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages. The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages. Is this normal? If so, how should I prevent this from happening? What is going on? The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s? I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet) Any help would be appreciated. Kind Regards Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thephoenix250 -
How Shall I represent title in my web pages
Few Questions. In Each And Every Page Title I Would Like To Add My Brand Name, and Then Some Keywords. Example : **Brand Name - Creative Watches ** I would like to use my brand name first of title and also in every page title. If i use brand name in every pages of my title does it will be duplicate title. please suggest me that can we use brand name in every pages of title or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sumit600 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1