A few questions:
Can you work the brand into the keywords somehow?
Is it necessary to show the brand at the end of the title for Google users?
Do you use the brand in the meta description?
Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
A few questions:
Can you work the brand into the keywords somehow?
Is it necessary to show the brand at the end of the title for Google users?
Do you use the brand in the meta description?
What keywords are you searching with? If you add the brand to the keywords does it show the full Title? Google may be truncating the title depending on your query.
Cheers
Rob
Don't forget that internal anchor text can determine which pages Google shows on a given SERP. If you do overuse a keyword in your internal anchor text it does dilute the keyword across the site. It's perhaps better to reduce the number of times a keyword is used in internal anchor text to focus a keyword, and links from that keyword, onto a particular page.
Discovering 404s can be useful.
Is the old page deleted? Why not 301 redirect the URL to an appropriate page elsewhere on your site? Tools such as Screaming Frog's SEO Spider can crawl your website and help you discover 404s. By redirecting the page with a permanent redirect search engines will to pass any link juice the previous page had to the new page. Redirecting will also cleanup your pages in the SERPs and help with any broken internal links on your site (though it'd be better to fix those).
There's no need to having a rel=canonical tag on a 404 page (but if you do, ensure the tag is for the page itself and not actual content on your site).
There's also no need for search engines to index your 404 page, so I suggest adding the meta NOINDEX tag to the page.
Yeah it's not great and is out of date, has broken links etc, but as with a lot of SEO advice is useful as a guide as to the sort of places you'd benefit from being listed in.
If you have a list of sites you are going to submit to then using an extension like Roboform or AutoFillForms can take a lot of the tedium out of the process and save you a few £/$/etc if you need to do that.
Are there any useful keywords in your site's name? If so then definitely keep it in.
It's important to keep post titles eye-catching, which usually means short with a simple message or idea, which may leave space for your brand. Personally if I can see the brand in the title as it displays on the SERP then I'm probably more likely to click on it.
Oh and Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin is all you need for WP...