Which is better Title length vs. keywords?
-
We run a jobboard. The title tag on a page for a job is often over 70 characters. An example of one would be:
" Supplier Quality Inspector (Electrical Manufacturing) Job in Orlando, FL 32809 at Pro Image Solutions | Orlando Jobs!"
The company name 'Orlando Jobs!" comes at the end but is also a really good keyword e.g. 'Orlando' and 'Jobs' I am interested in suggestions as to how to make these titles better. For example take off the company name when we go over 70 characters? Move the company name to the front of the title because the company name is also good keywords? I am looking for the best way to handle the issue is all. Thanks.
-
Thanks for all your answers
-
Hi,
I will suggest something like this
Orlando Jobs| Supplier Quality Inspector|FL 32809@Pro Image Solutions
Supplier Quality Inspector|FL 32809@Pro Image Solutions|Orlando Jobs
If we go through your specifications like "FL 32809 at Pro Image Solutions"
Search engines they won't care about prepositions,verbs like "at","on","is",
so after delimiting these things i got these two Titles. And instead of "Pipe symbol" you can use "hyphen ( - )".
I hope it is useful.
Thank you.
-
I'm going to come in on the other side and say I think your current page title structure is actually extremely good, Scott.
As always with these kinds of questions, it's best to approach it from the user's perspective first. Most of the time that also lines up very well with what the search engines will value, but a well-ranking page that can't get someone to click is wasted effort. So user first.
This in mind, who is this page more valuable for - someone just generally looking for job listings in Orlando? Or someone who who's background has him looking for quality inspector or quality control jobs in Orlando?
It's important to remember that search engines place considerably more value on words earlier in the title (and human readers do too), so having "Orlando Jobs" at the beginning would imply the page is most useful for info about Orlando Jobs. But for a searcher looking for general job info, this page is going to be a severe disappointment - it just doesn't provide any of the info and resources a general job seeker is looking for. The home page or a special "how to search for jobs in Orlando" resource page would be much better.
So, given this page is ONLY useful for someone looking for quality inspector-related work, "Orlando Jobs" is not a good focus keyword because it just doesn't accurately describe the very specific value of the page. It's never a question of whether it's a good keyword for you, it's a matter of using good keywords for your targeted visitor and for what each page is specifically about. Plus, putting that phrase at the beginning of every page title would seriously confuse the search engines.
Also, by having the wrongly targeted Orlando Jobs at the beginning, you'll likely run out of room to include the much more useful (to the user) full job title on the actual results page. That title on the results page needs to function (along with the meta-description) as a very strong indicator that clicking to the page will get him what he is looking for. And remember, that page title is what will get displayed if someone links on Twitter, Facebook or other social media so specific is better there too.
If the title ran a little long, I'd be much happier losing a bit of the generic phrase/company name than any part of the job title. Which is also to say I'm not advocating dropping the company name - I think it's fine where it is for the times that it does get included. It's not like anything breaks when the title is over 70 characters, it just means the tail end of the title may get truncated with [...]
Sorry if this went on a little, but figured it might help to have the background which you could use to make decisions about other pages' titles as well, rather than just a prescription for this one use case.
Bottom line - I vote for leaving your titles as-is!
Hope that was helpful?
Paul
P.S. If I were trying to shorten the titles, I'd consider leaving out the zip code. Do you find many people searching for jobs that way? (Your Google Analytics/Webmaster Tools will tell you if many use the zip as a search term) If not, you could drop it. I'm just not familiar enough with your line of business to know whether that gets used a lot, so I'd want some data to back up the decision either way.
-
I agree with Billy in that in your case, I'd put the Orlando Jobs first, because that is eye-catching and a good keyword for you.
There's a good, albeit basic article that I read this morning that talks about whether using branding in the Title is a good idea or not:
http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/complete-guide-title-tags/
In your case, I think I'd put Orlando Jobs first, then the auto-generated title of the job. If you have to truncate the job title to keep it under 70 characters, that's probably better than having the brand fall off the end.
-
In this instance I would probably go with something like this:
Orlando Jobs!: Quality Inspector | Electrical Manufacturing - Orlando
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
-
Robots.txt on http vs. https
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Rottentomatoes.com - mobile ranks better than desktop?
Howdy Mozzers, I don't see this very often but figured I would share my findings, no surprise that I found a huge portal like rottentomatoes.com ranking for the keyword: new on dvd , but for the last month or so - the page that is indexed for it is their "mobile" view. ( Screen Shot Attached ) I have a few ideas how you could go about fixing this - but just more of a conversation piece - have many of you ever seen such a thing - especially on a portal so big? Your pal, Chenzo ScreenShot2014-12-02at101927AM_zps107789f1.png
Technical SEO | | Chenzo0 -
Title in google organic display
The title (top link) in my organic result in google search has my page title then a dash and another keyword. This keyword is not related to the search result. It may discourage clicks. Where does google get that and how can i change it? For example: Page Title - unrelated keyword
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
url
link description0 -
Crawl Diagnostics and Duplicate Page Title
SOMOZ crawl our web site and say we have no duplicate page title but Google Webmaster Tool says we have 641 duplicate page titles, Which one is right?
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Help with duplicate title tags.
Hi Just going through Seomoz crawl diagnostics for one of my clients sites & see that the title tags for over 2,000 pages are the same due to the way there site software generates the titles using php, examples : **home page** = <title>Home - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> other page = <title>A0 Frames - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> So as you can see the page titles have the page name given to the beginning of the title which is fine as they have the keyword, then the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount Now if i take out the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount the home page is going to have just the word Home which is rubbish & the other pages will have the keyword which is better but not great, just wondered if any one has a better solution?.
Technical SEO | | askshopper0 -
What if my brand name is my keyword?
Referencing the new 'over optimization' penalties.. What if your company name was "Buy a Burrito" and your website website was buyaburrito.com (not a real site), and your main keyphrase was "buy a burrito". Will Google treat all Branded Terms as exact or phrase match keywords and penalize you?
Technical SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Estimating local or long tail keywords
Google data show little or no traffic for some local and long tail keywords. Do they just have a cut off that anything say under 50 keywords does not show up? Is this data 100% accurate? Are there other methods or tools for measuring this better? Thanks much!
Technical SEO | | BrandonWentland0 -
Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0