Using symbols in the html title of a webpage
-
If you a symbol in the title of a webpage will this dilute the keywords in the title
thus making it rank worse in search engineshere is an example
<title><br /> Black Shoe Polish<br /></title>
versus
<title><br />
Black Shoe Polish<br /></title>
will the extra symbols count as words and thus the dilute the effectiveness of the Black Shoe Polish keyword. sort of making like 4 words instead 3.
By the way, The reason to use a symbol is to make it stand on in the search engine results
-
I doubt this will dilute the effectiveness of the keyword - what I would be more concerned about is a potential ranking penalty. I have seen this technique used in the past but hardly ever see it being effective these days.
I would stick to crafting well crafted titles designed for the user in mind - keeping your keywords first in the title.
-
Interesting, but here is the other question: within the pantheon of SEO ranking factors, how important is this to you? In other words, you seem to believe from a reader perspective it will in some way provide an increase in something other than ranking on a search engine. If that is true, and this is the only change you are going to make, I cannot see this one item changing your ranking by even one position on Black Shoe Polish (as an example). If your site is a Shoe-Polish.com, and the pages are black, brown, cordovan, and white. Someone searching for black shoe polish is just as likely to still find it. The question becomes does it then provide anything new or better for you by way of the action the visitor to the site will take? Will they be more apt to stay on the page, will they stay longer, will they take a buying action?
For me, it would have no effect as a visitor. As to worrying about a single point within all of on site SEO, I wouldn't unless it is that your site is shoe polish and you are trying to sell turtles by adding a symbol for more attention. Hope this helped a little.
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
-
Should we use Cloudflare
Hi all, we want to speed up our website (hosted in Wordpress, traffic around 450,000 page views monthly), we use lots of images. And we're wondering about setting up on Cloudflare, however after searching a bit in Google I have seen some people say the change in IP, or possible sharing of Its with bad neighbourhoods, can really hit search rankings. So, I was wondering what the latest thinking is on this subject, would the increased speed and local server locations be a boost for SEO, moreso than a potential loss of rankings for changing IP? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tiromedia1 -
Can OG titles be used as a substitute for Meta titles
We use og (open graph) titles in lieu of meta titles. Is there any downside to using just one. Should we be using both og and meta titles on our page. Appreciate any insight. Himanshu
Technical SEO | | patilhimanshu0 -
Google is not respecting the meta title
We're experiencing a peculiar situation with Google not respecting our meta <title>.</p> <p>As you can see in the first image (search result), the title <a href="http://open.iebschool.com/profesores/startups/">for the page</a> is a part of the content. This is relatevely normal for the description, but we never heard of Google doing this before.</p> <p>In the code, the <title> and meta description are correctly implemented.</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><meta name="description" content="Profesores, tutores, autores y docentes 2.0 de Open IEBS. Conoce su Biografía, experiencia, reputación, conexiones sociales y las valoraciones de alumnos."/><br /><title>Conoce los profesores, tutores, autores y docentes de Open IEBS.</title> In a further research, we discovered that the title which is using is an in anwith the following code (cleaned and simplified for the question): <hgroup> Pilar Soro
Technical SEO | | ofuente
0 Seguidor
Para poder seguir al Profesor, debes de registrarte aquí. Profesora y experta en redes sociales. Formadora de docentes, [...]
</hgroup> Note: we're correcting the code since this is quite messy, but it's the one we have now The point is that google has considered that this particular is more important than the title itself. This would make sense if we were looking for that name, but the search was simply "site:domain.com". Two things for which this is even more strange are the following: while all the /profesor/%category%/ has the same code, this only happens in some search results and not in all of them; why is it appearing in some pages, but respecting my title in others? the previous code is not the only one in the page, there are about 10 others and some are placed before and some are placed after; so, why this one and not the first or the last? What is more strange is why this article in particular and not any other of the 10 on the page since some of them are placed before and some of them are placed after. Provided this situation, we would like to know: is this a common situation? Is it happening to more people? why is it happening? Is it somehow related to , <hgroup>and ? why that piece of code and not any other article? and why is it only happening in some pages? more important, can it be corrected or can we take advantage of it somehow? Thank you in advance. Any light you can shed on this will be well received! AJ2CUSe.png?1?8232 </hgroup>0 -
• symbol in title tag
We have a few title tags with a circular dot symbol, which is created by the code "•" Humans see a dot, but googlebot sees • Does this negatively impact our SEO, or is googlebot aware that **• == *** to human eyes
Technical SEO | | lighttable0 -
How to search HTML source for an entire website
Is there a way for me to do a "view source" for an entire website without having to right-click every page and select "view source" for each of them?
Technical SEO | | SmartWebPros0 -
Using Blogger.com
I have a client that is currently using blogger.com for their blog. I don't have much experience with this site as I have mostly used Wordpress in the past. Are there any good SEO plugins/tools for this site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Google picking up wrong page title
Hi, When searching for "Tottenham Forum" on google.co.uk (link below) http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tottenham+forum&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a The site I manage (THFCTalk.com) is listed as 4th in the search results, but was hacked a few months ago and the search results lists the page title as "Free Shipping. Order Cialis Online. - Online Pharmacy" when the actual page title of THFCTalk is not actually set at that. Any idea how to fix this so Google updates this header on the search results? - as it is surely putting people off from clicking on our search result
Technical SEO | | WalesDragon0 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreatMaeM3.png TLcD8.png
0