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So is it because of a problem with the setup of the homepage? Would a 301 redirect mean that /home-2 is still ranking.. ideally I need to get it out of the results all together.

I'm in the process of having a site built using WP as the cms, and keeping SEO in mind while it's being produced.

Because I'm experimenting with title/meta desc I'm checking rankings each day on whatsmyserp dot com. During development I noticed one day the ranking for websitename.com had disappeared and websitename.com/home-2 was ranking.

I went into pages of the wp account and deleted the 2nd homepage that had been created for some reason, and that was over half a week ago now. /home-2 is still ranking even though it's non-existent and the actual homepage url isn't ranking at all.

Any suggestions on what I should do/why this is happening? Thanks for any help

Hey Doug,

For the record my scenario doesn't have anything to do with photography or Orlando, but the relevance behind your advice still completely rings true. While I doing title and meta planning I'm trying to focus on designing it all to be engaging for users while still applying the right mechanics.

I read something earlier today from Yoast:

"Write proper page titles. Not overly optimized titles targeting a gazillion keywords. No. Proper, one sentence titles that contain your brand name and your focus keyword. It’s not hard, just do it. And for your homepage your title should probably start with your brand name, 50% of the emails we get is about homepages where people have ridiculously optimized titles instead of just the name of their company."

My take on this is that writing title's (at least partially) as sentences is the way to go according to the advice. I also read today someone saying to have keywords in the title and description wrapped with other words.

However Dana's advice above, not to mention researching through a decent whack SERPs today seems to suggest that a format like: business name- keyword ..etc gets results.

Do you have any take on this Doug?

Thanks Ross!

Dana that's super helpful, thanks for the extra info on trimming up the tail end

I've read everywhere that it's vital to get your target keyword to the front of the title that you're writing up.

Taking into account that Google likes things looking natural I wanted to check if my writing title's like this for example:

"Photographers Miami- Find the right Equipment and Accessories"

..Repeated for every page (maybe a page on photography in miami, one on videography in Orlando etc) is a smart way to write titles or if by clearly stacking keywords at the front of every title won't be as beneficial as other ways of doing it?

Hey Thanks David, I've noticed that without even having an EMD site half way built (but having it live on the domain while things have been put together) it's actually started to rank for the main phase.

Albeit on the 24th page, but still I haven't done anything to it content-wise or tag-wise so it surprised me a bit.

Can I ask you something I just noticed about the SERPs from the link you just posted:  I thought that the limit for a meta description is about 165 characters. Some of the results for MOZ in that link have been cut off after 135/140.

It the 165 estimate exactly that, and estimate, or should 165/170 characters always be displayed in results?

Hi Guys,

Say I'm (completely hypothetically) building weddingvenuesnewyork.com and right now I'm organizing the tags for each page. What's the best layout so that I can optimize for "wedding venues new york" as much as possible without it becoming spammy.

Right now I'm looking at something like "Wedding Venues New York: Wedding Receptions and Ceremony Venues" for the title.. To get other strong keywords in there too.

Is there a better layout/structure?.. And is having the first words of the title on the homepage the same as the domain name going to strengthen the ranking for that term, or look spammy to Google and be a bad move? This is a new site being built