Title tags seem to be going against Rand and suggestions here, what can I do? Can you help me please?

[asbchris]

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

[vmialik]

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.

[asbchris]

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

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[vmialik]

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!