Different Title and Meta Title Tag
-
Do the search engines rank based on the meta title tag or the title tag?
What if you have a different meta title tag from the title tag?
Edited:
I have edited to clarify my issue. Having a different meta title tag from the title tag.
Thank you for those who have answered the question so far.
-
Interesting. Thanks!
-
Hello ASMC, I believe you are asking whether search engines look at the title tag
<title>This is the title</title>
or if they look at a meta title tag
The answer is that search engines look for the first example, the title tag. The second example is not a normal meta tag and does not need to be used.
I hope this answers your question.
-
Thank you all, I was referring to different title tag and meta title tag
Thanks,
Raymond
-
Search engines look at your: URL / title tag / H1 / Body but do not place your exact keyword in each of these because that is over optimizing.
If you keyword is "blue cheese" your title can be "blue cheese is my favorite dressing."
As far as meta description: this does not help SEO with spiders however having your keyword within this will result in having that term bold when searched.
Meta keywords are outdated, Google does nor count them and Bing consideres this a form of spam. Also having meta keywords will givre your competition your terms.
Just use this tool: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new
I would recommend focusing on one keyword per page. Two max..
-
Search engines consider your title tag one of the main factors when crawling your site. There are a few different meta tags so I'm not sure which one you're referring to, however if you're talking about meta description then this one should be different but targeting the same keywords as you have in your title tag. If you make them identical it will look suspicious to a search engine. Take a look at Google's SEO starter guide:
Pages 3-5 talks about Title and Meta description,
also take a look at SEOMoz beginner's guide:
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Also SEOMoz cheat sheet:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
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
-
Tag Clouds in Google Despite Canonical Links for Single Tags/Articles
I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article. I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that. Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive. I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com0 -
Affect of ™ and ® in title for SEO
I am looking at adding the trademark and rights reserved symbols to some of my titles. I think this might help with click through rate. From what I have found, this shouldn't have an affect on SEO unless it makes the title too long. Is this correct? Stephen
On-Page Optimization | | stephen.volker1 -
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 -
Should I add canonical tag on these pages?
Hi folks I have some pages that used to rank pretty well..but I believe it is affected due to the content similarities. Here is one the sub category pages http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/2/Full-Body-Kits_Duraflex.html the main category page http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/Exterior_Body-Styling_Full-Body-Kits.html These 2 links have very similar contents. The content are dynamic generated by template and I don't think I am able to change content for each individual pages since there are over 2000-3000 of them or more. Should I use canonical tag on the Duraflex.html page to give the main category page all the link juices and credits? There are about 20 other pages like this under this main category. Is it right to canonical all of them? Please let me know if anyone has any suggestion.. thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
Does the title tag on the home page affect sub-pages?
Hello. I am thinking of changing our home page title tag to include our two most valuable keywords from two of our sub-pages. Would this help the rankings of those two sub-pages? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
I am optimizing title tags and was wondering if it makes a difference if I use "commas" in between keywords that are synonyms or should I use "and" instead?
For example: "pants, trousers at pants.com" or "pants and trousers at pants.com".
On-Page Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
Changing Link Title Tags & Backlinks
On 4/19/12 I began changing the link title tags in an effort to further optimize my website. I thought they were excessively long and it would be beneficial to make them more concise. On 4/26/12 my website traffic began to fall drastically and I'm not sure if it is from google's penguin update or from changing the link title tags. I started looking into the sudden drop of traffic and realized that when I run the site explorer tool on all of the pages I changed, the URL is redirecting. It appears that the backlinks are not passing through to the new URL. Before I Changed the Link Title Tag: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.beautystoponline.com%2FAndis-Professional-Hair-Clippers-s%2F102150.htm **After I Changed the Link Title Tag: ** http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.beautystoponline.com%2FAndis-Clippers-s%2F102150.htm So my questions are: The above example shows that the old title tag (www.beautystoponline.com/Andis-Professional-Hair-Clippers-s/102150.htm) has 43 backlinks and the new one (www.beautystoponline.com/Andis-Professiona-Hair-Clippers-s/102150.htm) has 0. Will the links eventually be attributed to the new URL. I understand that the user will still be directed to my website they click the any of the backlinks, but will the link juice pointing the old URL pass through the new one? Would it be better, in the long run, to continue optimizing the link title tags.
On-Page Optimization | | BeautyStop0 -
What does the "base href" meta tag do? For SEO and webdesign?
I have encounter the "base href" on one of my sites. The tag is on every page and always points to the home URL.
On-Page Optimization | | jmansd0