Title tag of product page including category keyword?

[jim_shook]

I'm doing some work on a site that essentially is about giving and getting reviews. It's heirarchy has categories and products within those categories.

For the title tag of the product pages, they currently have "Best {Category} | {Product} Reviews"

I've advised them that they should remove the "Best {Category}" part because a) they're already targeting the category pages themselves and b) from a user perspective, the product page should just have a title tag that makes sense for that particular page (the page is not necessarily the "best" and certainly is not a series of products within that category).

I wanted to post here to confirm that my advice is sound. Thanks.

[khi5]

if I understand you correctly, this sounds like an issue I am facing and this is what I am experiencing and maybe that can be of help. My site is real estate related. 
Page 1 title tag: "City Homes for Sale" (page I want to rank for) 
Page 2 title tag: "City Home Picture Gallery" (lots of original pictures and videos I want G to index in order to increase the amount of unique content from my site G is indexing, but I don't care much for - more a page for users to see beautiful pictures)

Unfortunately, when users search for "city homes for sale" on search engines, often this Page 2 type will show (I have a lot of Page 2 types for various neighborhoods). I guess because Page 2 has more unique content it ranks well, also because it uses words "City" and "home" in title tag. I have now taken the word "Home" out of title tag and I look forward to see if it helps. Not just in terms of dropping ranking for Page 2 (which would be great), but more importantly will search engines be able to get the point that Page 1 is the relevant page. I am interlinking from Page 2 to Page 1 in a logical way with appropriate keywords. It should be crystal clear, but our supposed super smart / advanced search engines do not seem to get it.

Conclusion: As a smaller / less authoritative website, I would definitely be very careful with keyword selection in title tag, as my site has proven that it can work against you. Large powerful websites can get away with more of this I believe and search engines seem to understand them much better. Therefore, I find with SEO advice it is so important to consider if the perspective is in comparison to similar authority websites.

[David-Kley]

Great question!

I think that leaving the category in place makes sense, but not at the beginning of the page title. Having the category can help further specify what the page is about, especially if there are links on that page back to that category. Here is an example:

{Product} Reviews | Best {Category}

In this format, you are stating the keyword or phrases you want to rank as the highest priority, and having the category be secondary. If you don't want to include it, you could also use the site name at the end as an alternative:

{Product} Reviews | Product review worded differently - YOURDOMAIN.com

In this format, you have a higher density of your keyword in the page title, while not overstuffing it. If you have a lot of reviews that rank, this can also help with brand or site recognition.

Hope this helps! Keep in mind, optimise around the user, and what your best guess is that they will type. Check in your analytics account to see what phrases users are typing, and structure your titles around that format. The structures above are just best guesses, but the analytics data will give you a much clearer picture.