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
-
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
Wrong page title in Google
Hi there, A while ago we took over the domain www.hoesjes.nl and forwarded it to our website www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. If you perform a search for the keyword 'hoesjes' in Google then we (www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl) show up on an organic number 1 position. The problem is that the page title isn't correct. Google shows the page title of the website hoesjes.nl we took over and (correctly?) redirected to our domain www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. Does anybody have any idea how to get rid of this wrong page title in Google?
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Here you can find a screenshot of what I mean. Thanks! Marcel0 -
Page not cached
Hi there, we uploaded a page but unfortunately didn't realise it had noindex,nofollow in the meta tags. Google had cached it then decached it (i guess thats possible) it seems? now it will not cache even though the correct meta tags have been put in and we have sent links to it internally and externally. Anyone know why this page isn't being cached, the internal link to it is on the homepage and that gets cached almost every day. I even submitted it to webmaster tools to index.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Use target keyword on several page titles or homepage only?
If I want my homepage to rank for a keyword (ie "red widgets"), does it support or dilute the homepage's rank if I use the keyword on other pages? I can see it working either way: The search engine looks at your site, sees that the target keyword is used throughout the site, and ranks the site higher as a result. Using the keyword on several pages makes it so none of them stand out, and ultimately it's harder to rank highly. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M0 -
Page Title Not Displayed in SERPS
Why would a page title not be displayed in the SERPS? Everything appears to be formatted correctly in the code, yet the title of the company gets displayed instead of the page title? Any general idea why this could be happening?
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
What are the causes of pages desindexation?
Hello, I was wondering what can be the causes of pages desindexation by Google? A poor quality pages,...? Thank you for your answers, Jonathan
Technical SEO | | JonathanLeplang0 -
Hundreds of 404 Pages, What Should I do?
Hi, My client just had there website redeveloped within wordpress. I just ran a crawl errors test for their website using Google Webmasters. I discovered that the client has about six hundred, 404 pages. Most of the error pages originated from their previous image gallery. I already have a custom 404 page set-up, but is there something else I should be doing? Is it worth while to 301 redirect every single page within the .htaccess file, or will Google filter these pages out of its index naturally? Thanks Mozers!
Technical SEO | | calindaniel0