Meta Description Question
-
Is it ok to put your domain name in the meta description if that is the name of your company? so if my company name is BlaBla.com and I want to have a meta description like
Shop for your next Widget at BlaBla.com. We have Widget in 30 colors. Free shipping for orders over $50.
and I am obviosuly promoting the widget page is this ok. I am concerned that Google will not like the domain name in the meta description. After Peguin I am paranoid about my shadow.....LOL
-
Hi John,
Let me repeat, know of no evidence of Google penalizing a site because of keyword use in the meta description tag. So including it or removing it here will most likely have little impact on your rankings, although it may impact your CTR. Having the your site name in both your title and meta description should be fine, at least from a ranking perspective.
Here's a hypothetical situation where you can get into trouble:
70% of your inbound anchor text is all the same keyword
The keyword is the first word of your title tag, and appears 2-3x
The keyword is stuffed in your body text.Yes, it's hard NOT to have your keyword as anchor text when you have an exact match domain, but there seems to be at least some evidence of Google hitting sites that have overly optimized exact match anchor text, even for branded domains. The jury is still out, but diversifying your inbound anchor text seems like a smart strategy.
-
Thanks Cyrus I am not sure what you mean by
"The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about."
You mean not to abuse Anchor Text ? When you domain and company name are both an EDM (a great thing to have in the past) it is hard not to use it in Anchor. I guess what you are saying is dont use mysite.com as anchor instead use My Site or Here?
Oh right now I have mysite.com in the title and in many of the meta descriptions so it sounds like I should remove it from one or the other.
-
As Ben said, as far as we know Google doesn't use the meta description in it's ranking algorythm in any significant way. And I haven't seen any evidence changing in light of Penguin. So if it's natural for you to include it in your meta description, I'd encourage you to do so.
That said, if your domain is an exact match and it's a keyword you use a lot, I would encourage you to be careful in other areas of over-optimization (title tag, inbound links, keyword stuffing, etc.)
The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about.
Additionally, here's a couple of my favorite articles on Penguin:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
-
Very good points. I would like the company name (same as domain name) to go either in the title of the description but I like your idea to put it in the Description and re-think the title for a call to action.
In some cases Google is using info from my footer instead of the Meta Description in the SERPs?
-
Google doesn't really look at the meta description anymore so I wouldn't stress about it.
Although personally I'd not include the domain name in the meta description as you're probably mentioning the brand name in the title tag and it's going to appear directly above the description in tiny green writing anyway. So why not fill your title tag with things designed to encourage a high click through? Things like "Free shipping on orders over $50. Widgets available in 30 colours including popular colour 1, popular colour 2 and popular colur 3."
-
I am beginning to realize that being an SEO is like being a Doctor or a Lawyer. You get to practice your entire career and people actually tolerate that behavior.
-
Oh and thanks for letting me know that I am not alone staring at the dark object on the floor and wonder were it took so much traffic. Until April 24th I had no idea shadows were black and white and liked the cold.
-
I guess I should also mention that the name of this company is also an Exact Domain Match (EDM) of a great key word within this industry.
So I am now afraid that if I don't take out all my references to the actually company name out of the Description I will get penalized for stuffing.
Putting the name of the company is very typical for e-commerce company.
-
I don't foresee this being a problem.
At all.
And I know what you mean about being scared of your own shadow
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
-
One more question about rel=canonical
I'm still trying to wrap my head around rel=canonical and its importance. Thanks to the community, I've been able to understand most of it. Still, I have a couple of very specific questions: I share certain blog posts on the Huffington Post. Here's an example: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/cedric-lizotte/munich-travel-guide_b_13438956.html - Of course I post these on my blog as well. Here: http://www.continentscondiments.com/things-munich-classics/ - Obviously the HuffPo has a huge DA, and I'll never match it. However the original post is mine, on my blog, and not on the HuffPo. They wont - obviously - add a rel=canonical just for me and for the sake of it, they have a million other things to do. QUESTION: Should I add a rel=canonical to my own site pointing to the post on the HuffPost? What would be the advantage? Should I just leave this alone? I share blog posts on Go4TravelBlog too. Example: http://www.go4travelblog.com/dallmayr-restaurant-munich/ - but, once again, the original post is on one of my blogs. In this case, it's on another blog of mine: http://www.thefinediningblog.com/dallmayr-restaurant-in-munich/ QUESTION: Well it's pretty much the same! Should I beg Go4TravelBlog to add a rel=canonical pointing to mine? If they refuse, what do I do? Would it be better to add a rel=canonical from my site to theirs, or do I fight it out and have a rel=canonical pointing to my own post? Why? Thanks a million for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | cedriklizotte0 -
Use of '&' in meta title
Hi, I know that use of '&' would be helpful to save space and also add more keyword variation to the title tag. But just want to make sure if it matters if I use '&' in most of my title tags? And also is it common to use more than & in one title? Would the following title be different in Google's perspective regardless of the title length? I am thinking they are all targeting the keywords 'fruit cake' and 'fruit bread', but the first one is the best. buy fruit cake & bread buy fruit cake & fruit bread buy fruit cake and fruit bread Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | russellbrown0 -
Getting Duplicate meta title, and meta description errors
I have a website with shopify CMS. At the run time some pages generating itself with Tags name ( or we can say it search pages) which has been used in collections. so it's Meta tag and description is same as well as collection and in SEO tools it showing duplicate meta title, description errors. 1. http://brok3nclothing.com/collections/tanks/girls-skate-clothing
On-Page Optimization | | 1akal
2. http://brok3nclothing.com/collections/accessories/girls-skate-clothing
3. http://brok3nclothing.com/collections/accessories/girls-skate-clothing
4. http://brok3nclothing.com/collections/tanks/girls-surf-clothing For example above URLs are not on website, its generating by self with tags name like girls-skate-clothing, girls-surf-clothing etc. and these pages are accessing Meta titles, description from http://brok3nclothing.com/collections/tanks/ So will you please suggest me that should I worry about these duplicate meta title, description errors ???0 -
To enter keyword meta tags or to not enter keyword meta tags?
I've been doing SEO for awhile, but new to SEOMoz. I'm surprised that SEOMoz does not recommend keyword meta tags. I didn't enter them for the longest time because I know Google doesn't care about them. However, I did read that other search engines DO use them. And therefore that is why you should have them. I teach my customers about SEO, and I know it would be much easier for them not to enter or worry about the keyword meta tags. However, I would love to hear opinions here. And to Bing/Yahoo put any weight into them or is it only really small search engines? Thanks! Hilary
On-Page Optimization | | endlessrange0 -
An ecomerce seo question
Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues. Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily) What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price. Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names (H1 will be saved for the category name). We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page. As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts. Many thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
This is a real dumb question about on page optimization
I've been reading the docs for using this site and am puzzled by the on page optimization reports, and the tactics for creating the reports. In no place can i find that you first must use the keywords you have identified to track in the campaign on pages on your web site. Am i missing something? From just reading how to do your campaign, it would appear that you never have to touch your pages with the keywords you want to track, all 500 of them for one page, if that's what you want to do. Not knowing how the application works, it is possible to imagine anything, including not needing to do the obvious steps of writing a well optimized page first. I want to presume that first you optimize your pages with the keywords you want to track, then go ahead and run your campaign. Although this is the obvious thing, I don't see that part of the seo puzzle being mentioned in any of the docs. Where do i hunt for that part of the equation?
On-Page Optimization | | highersourcesites0 -
Duplicate Title question
Thanks Mozzers in advance for any insight into what I'm sure is a basic SEO question. I'm working with a resort in the great state of Maine. Their home page title reads Maine Resorts, Resorts in Maine, (company name). The site has about 400 URL's and over half of the URL's utilize the first keyword phrase of the home page title, "Maine Resorts." Predominately, I find them used on the Accommodations pages (pages that describe each room with a picture) which I would label as deeper pages and non-conversion type pages. The page titles themselves are not exact duplicates of the Home Page Title but might read something like "Maine Resorts, Company Name, Accommodation Listing." My concern is that the heavy use of "Maine Resorts" as the first phrase in over 200 plus pages might be competing against the home page and pulling the home page ranking down. Thanks for any help given!
On-Page Optimization | | hawkvt10 -
How unique do product descriptions need to be?
I'm rewriting approximately 10,000 product descriptions, but for feasability it's useful to sometimes reuse some of the phrases that are there (and on other websites as they come straight from the manufacturer -eg. key features), how unique does the content have to be - are we talking 100%, 75%, 50% for it to be effective in google? Same question goes for the product title! Many thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | ewanr0