Title tags seem to be going against Rand and suggestions here, what can I do? Can you help me please?
-
Hi to all,
Ok so I have been beating myself up trying to figure out how to create a good ranking title for my websites homepage.
My competition uses commas in its title tags
But these are 100% against what Rand and many posts say here. I watched his whiteboard where he says don't use commas. There are posts that say, don't use commas.
The biggest one is mortonbuildings(dot)com - followed by - lesterbuildings(dot)com
They basically have the same title tags with commas.
So what's the catch here? What am I missing? of course these sites have Great Domain Authority, but I swear what they are doing is going against what Rand and many other seo professional's are preaching.
I thought it should read better for visitors? But to me it looks like keyword stuffing with a brand name?
Any help is greatly appreciated to let me know if these commas and strategies are good to do? or bad news?
Again thank you for your time to help a small business.
Chris
-
Yea right, with the sharks eating up the smaller guys, and growing bigger and bigger.
The reassuring thing is that Google is generally on your side, and will tell you to play by the rules because it has stated that there is a lot of spam to fight, but it is tackling it one big spam tactic at a time.
-
Thank you for all of the help.
I feel like a fish in the ocean sometimes.
The sharks are swimming all around, yet I am trying to get from point A to point B the correct way.
I consider Moz the authority on seo practices, yet I see so many sites that go against these different principles and out rank almost everyone in their industry, that I am like - well do you go with the pack and hope for the best, or do you stand your ground and do what's right,? kind of like that whole "If your friends were jumping off a bridge would you?" type of thing.
Thank you for pulling me back off the ledge.
Chris
-
Hi Chris,
You are correct in thinking that commas can be problematic. I tend to get around this by creating a short phrase that doesn't require any and then either use a pipe " | " or hypen " - " to separate this before my company name.
Try not to focus too much on what the competition are doing and stick to good-old best practice. You don't want a spammy sounding title and instead something that creates a short phrase. For example, you don't really want something that would say "Link Building, Linkbuilding, Linkbuilding Services, Linkbuilding Professionals". Instead, create something like "Link building services and co-citation creation - iNet SEO Ltd".
The more you can make it read like a short sentence, the better.
-Andy
-
Hi Chris,
You are correct that keyword stuffing is no longer a legit SEO practice, and it is not ideal for user readability. Can you still get away with it sure. However, it is not a long term strategy as at any moment Google can pull its plug on you and de rank or penalize these efforts.
A better approach is to rank one keyword per page, you can rank for all the terms and potentially even higher then trying to rank one page for 3 terms. This is a better approach for users and Google alike.
To step into the shoes of the competitors. There was a time when the competition was low and ranking for multiple keywords per page was doable and so you had limited pages, and many words to rank for, so that is what you went after. Back in the day keyword stuffing was the way to go. As a result, companies such as Morton Buildings could easily rank for them. Currently they have built up the authority and the traffic for these terms, and so they are easily ranking top position for short tail (two word) competitive keywords. So in their eyes, they may even have in-house SEOs that understand that keyword stuffing is a no-no; however, they are currently ranking for these terms, and they may not want to touch and change what is not broken in their eyes. As soon as Google or other search engines take action on this, they will have to take appropriate measures to change and fix things up.
Again, for someone starting out in small business, at this point, going for multiple keywords per page is not a realistic approach. You have much better shot going after one keyword per page. Even a long tail keyword such as "small wooden horse barns" vs competitive "horse barns" to try to rank competitively.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Titles and Metas disappeared?? Help please!
Hi everyone, Had a bit of a concern today, my weekly report has come through and my crawl issues have skyrockets by over 400! It says my metas and titles are missing but when I check through the site manually they seem to all still be there, I'm getting the same problem when I use screaming frog to crawl the site. I would really appreciate an explanation from someone as to why this is happening as I am quite confused about the situation. Thank you people Charlie Our website is www.homelogic.co.uk 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MintySEO0 -
Help... To Optimize Category Page or Not?
My question is about whether to optimize a category page or not, but it’s a rather odd situation. Here’s a bit of background to start. When we relaunched our site, about six months ago, we had primary, secondary, and tertiary categories created. A user could reach all three levels by clicking through the site. Then we decided instead of linking to the tertiary categories, that we’d turn them into filters which can be applied at the secondary level. Thus, there is not actually a direct link to the 3rd level categories on the site. An important side note, I did check and confirm they are still included in the sitemap file. My initial thoughts were to forget any further optimization of those 3rd level categories, but as it turns out we still have rankings for some of them. Now the question… Because some of these pages are ranking and are found in the sitemap, should I include them in my SEO plan to build up and optimize, or because they are no longer linked to directly on the site will they eventually fizzle out (and I shouldn’t do anything further). This is such a unique situation that I am really looking for some insight from the community. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
SEO Title Versus Meta Description Tag
From an SEO perspective, is the title tag more important than the description tag? We use a set format for these tags on our real estate web site. The site contains 300 listings. Sample Title Tag:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Greenwich Village | Office Space Rental| 2300SF $9583/month Sample Description Tag:
Classic Greenwich Village office rental. Hardwood floors, 11' ceiling. 5 oversized windows. 24/7 attended lobby. Renovated common areas. Below market rent. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by repeating the Square Footage and monthly rent amounts in the title tag? Should this tag be used for a short more descriptive terms so as to maximize the SEO benefit? Should these numbers be listed in the description tag? The listings are not heavily SEO optimized so I don't know whether this is really a non-issue.0 -
Does anyone know of any tools that can help split up xml sitemap to make it more efficient and better for seo?
Hello All, We want to split up our Sitemap , currently it's almost 10K pages in one xml sitemap but we want to make it in smaller chunks splitting it by category or location or both. Ideally into 100 per sitemap is what I read is the best number to help improve indexation and seo ranking. Any thoughts on this ? Does anyone know or any good tools out there which can assist us in doing this ? Also another question I have is that should we put all of our products (1250) in one site map or should this also be split up in to say products for category etc etc ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Canonical tags and product descriptions
I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions. A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions. It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag. I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters. Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet. So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions. I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i'). Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group. Does this seem a sensible thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Using standard title and description tags with rich snippets are there potential conflicts
Recently I've employing rich snippets using the guides from schema.org I find them a great way to let the search engines understand the content of my web pages, also author and publisher tags are all thrown into the migreat great love it. My question however is what to do with the existing title and description tags? Should they be left in? Do they cause conflicts with the search engines? Should I just ignore this gut feeling and leave them in. Any insights into the use of schema and a standard tags appreciated. Best David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Time sensitive: HELP! We are having a problem doing a 301 redirect.....what can we do instead?
Our website has dynamic URLs and we are moving to another server/platform. 301 redirects is looking like a highly unlikely solution. A 3rd party company is handling the back-end of the website which they say works more like a "search engine" than a traditional website. Maybe that explains why they're having a hard time with the 301 redirects. Worst case scenario: we can't use the 301 redirect. What else can we do? We are considering "Indicate your canonical (preferred) URLs by including them in a Sitemap" as Google describes here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#2. I'm wondering if this method only applies to duplicate content........and what would happen once the old website results in a 404 page...... HELP! We need to cross over to the new platform as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatriotOutfitters810