Utf-8 symbols in the Title or Meta Description?
-
Has somebody any experience (pros or cons) to using utf-8 symbols in the Title or in the Meta Description tags?
Expedia uses it:
http://prntscr.com/74ofrv -
Google is officially supporting some emoticons. I talked to one big-brand SEO last week who has tested it with a fair degree of success. A couple of warnings:
(1) Testing the impact on one title tag is a fair amount of work, so it really has to be a high-impact SERP. This isn't something you want to spend days on across thousands of results.
(2) Make sure the character/symbol really is relevant. People focus on the first two words of a headline, and that emoticon may well take the place of one of those words, so make it count. I wouldn't do this just because you can.
(3) Not all characters render properly on all OSs and devices. Make sure to test.
-
Thanks for your Answer Ikkie, but my question was especially about using "utf-8 symbols in the Title/Meta tags".
Should I use, or not? -
that there are no real pros or cons in where you place the
TITLE
element within the HTML document’s HEAD area. However, although this is nothing whatsoever to do with SEO, I do remember reading that in an HTML document, the best practise is to include theTITLE
after the firstMETA
tag that declares the content-type and/or charset value(s), e.g.:<code><title>[Placeholder Title]</title> […]</code>
(I am fairly certain that this technique is stated somewhere in the W3C Recommendation, HTML 4.01 Specification, in the section "The global structure of an HTML document" ( …but if I would double-check this.) Although I think the technical reason was to ensure titles that contain HTML entities that need to be escaped should always declare a character set before you provide the actual text, it still makes you think: is source-ordering important?
At the very least, it is conventional wisdom to always place the content you want to gain the most exposure in terms of SEO/the search-engines' results pages (SERPS) higher up in the web pages (X)HTML source code (e.g. in a website without any
META
description tags set, the first paragraph in the document will probably be the one chosen to represent that webpage’s description in its SERP listing, not the second or third etc., etc.) Ultimately, I would say that you certainly have nothing to lose in placing thisTITLE
(or any content) higher.You can also see the guidelines for this on the MOZ blog link here
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
-
Google Adding Incorrect Location to the end of Title Tags in SERPs
I have an issue with the way Google is adding to a client’s Title Tag. Since we relaunched the website a few months ago, Google has been adding an indiscriminate “– London” to the end of title tags. That would be fine if the company was solely London based but we have stores outside London too, and it’s adding “– London” to the end of those individual store title tags there too. So, if you do a search for “location widget” our page title is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrewDaviesLondon
“location widget | Brand name”
but then Google pops in:
“location widget | Brand name - London”
Which isn’t great if the location is in Scotland! We are adding structured data to the store pages to try and combat this, the store pages are all well optimised for the location (and ranking well), but I’m wondering if I’ve missed anything obvious? I thought it might lesson as the new site became more trusted in Google, but the rogue “London” seems to be increasing... Thanks for your help!0 -
Pagination do you still need unique titles?
Hi Guys, For pagination, if you have implemented the rel Prev/Next tags correctly, is it fine to have duplicate titles in the series example: Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/2
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/3
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/4 Some people mention that you should make them unique and add the page number example: Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/2
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/3
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/4 Keen to hear what you guys thing? Personally, i think its fine to have duplicate title tags when you have properly implemented rel Prev/Next tags as Googel will see the series as one. Cheers.0 -
Different language with direct translation: duplicate content, meta?
For a site that does NOT want a separate subdomain, or directory, or TLD for a country/language would the directly translated page (static) content/meta be duplicate? (NOT considering a translation of the term/acronym which could exist in another language) i.e. /SEO-city-state in English vs. /SEO-city-state Spanish -In this example a term/acronym that is the same in any language. Outside of duplicate content, are their other conflict potentials in rankings you can think of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bozzie3110 -
18,000 'Title Element is too Long' Errors
How detrimental is this in the overall SEO scheme of things? Having checked 3 of our main competitors, they too seem to have similar issues... I am trying to look at a solution but it is proving very difficult! Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
SERP Drop overnight for one of our domains - could it be the title changes?
Hi Scratching our heads here over SERP drop for some of our product pages, Although they are all uniquely titled with the product name, we have recently added 4 words at the end of our title, like a slogan which are repeated on every one of our product pages. However, we've also seen a drop, but not as far, on related category pages, these have unique titles. When we talk about "unique title" being important for SEO, does that mean 0 reptition between page titles? I see many companies use their site name in the title (even here see | SEOMOZ Q&A - would four words at the end of a title do this? Or am i barking up the wrong tree entirely? Ive seen so much movement over the past few weeks its hard to correlate anything we do with the result, so even after advise I think i'll wait a week
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Updating Titles - How long do you wait for Google to pick it up... any tips?
Hi We recently trialed some new page titles which seriously helped our CTR on serps, so we thought we would roll them backwards to our other product pages, only about 5% of the SERPS show the new titles. Do I need to change more on the page to get google to notice these changes?Or just hold on and wait?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Ranking locally without local keywords in title?
I have a website that targets national keywords. I would like to be able to rank locally for these keywords as well without having the city in the title. What is the best strategy for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0