Title Tags and Over Optimization Penalty
-
In the past, it was always a good thing to put your most important keyword or phrase at the beginning of the Title Tag with the company name at the end. Now according to the over optimization penalty in the Whiteboard Friday video, it seems to be better to be more human and put the company name at the beginning with the keyword or phrase following. Am I understanding this correctly?
-
Over optimizing is having an [Exact keyword] all over a page.
If you url is http://url.keyword
If your title is - keyword
H1- Keyword
decription - keyword
body - keyword... most people who overstuff will add a ton of words just so they can include there keywords many times. 1 keyword per 100 words is a good number to go by... so they add 10000 words and 100o keywords
image - keyword
footer - keyword
When everything on the page is designed for a bot the bot will know. The best practice to avoid over opting is to include your [Exact] key in some places where it would make sense.
To avoid over optimizing use broad for some keywords and exact for some.. Mix it up and focus on where things will be best suitable for your users.
-
to add to the question, some people say that this is only affecting low quality sites, if your site is a well established site then you don't have to worry about this.
- Define established site
- Is this true?
Im freaking about this over optimization thing. I don't list keywords with commas I generally do (keyword) - (keyword) and only 2, and I avoid putting the company at the end...seems that now it has to be there....
-
I think a lot depends on the strength of the brand/Company name. If you've got a well established reputation in your niche then having your company name in a prominent position is more than likely going to be beneficial.
I'm also wondering what affect this might have on brand related searches in the future. Be interesting to take a look at branded vs non-branded traffic and how the positioning of brand/company names affects things...
Also, what kind of searches are we talking about (navigational, transactional, and informational.)?
-
There are many ranking factors and yes, having keyword placement first in a title is great from a SERP perspective. The user typed "keyword" they will most likely click on "keyword" when its the first thing in your title it is more likely to get clicked on.
This should help you understand more about all the factors and how much they really matter.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6
-
Thanks for the response RankSurge.
I am torn on this as I was raised on implementing keywords first and the brand second. I was also raised on left to right reading for importance of keywords that described the page you were about to visit. Visitors (to my site anyway) search for products first, not brand names.
Specifically, I rank #2 for "outdoor enclosures" (L-com.com). So, you're saying I should reverse the order and I might see an increase in daily clicks?
Thanks!
-
I recently went through this with a client of mine. Previously, they had their top 2 keywords first, then the company name.
They were ranked #2 in Google for both of their terms.
We made the switch last Monday, placing the company name first, then the keywords.
The other sites in the top 5 with them all have their keywords listed first.
Impact?
Since we made the title switch, they are still in the second position, but they are now averaging 15 more clicks per day!
I know some will say it's because the company name stands out from the clutter - and I agree on some levels. But as Doug mentioned, the title is phrased in a way that we humans like to read, so I think that helps too.
-
You don't need to put the company name at the beginning, just write your titles in a way that would make sense to a normal person reading them. Make sure they correctly describe the page content in natural language (that includes your keywords).
One of the big problems comes about when you're trying to target multiple keywords and have title tags that are just a comma separated list of keywords.
Rand's recent Whiteboard Friday covered this: 6 Changes Every SEO Should Make BEFORE the Over-Optimization Penalty Hits - Whiteboard Friday
Also think about how to make these compelling for someone looking at the title in the SERPS. Can you give the reader a reason to click though on your entry?
Hope this helps.
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
-
What does it exactly means when Google brings the "brand name" to the beggining of the page title in search results when it was actually given at the end?
We see many times...page titles starts with "brand name: page for etc" where actually "brand name" has been given at the end and keywords at beginning. Why does Google make this change? I noticed this happens when similar title tags are used by multiple websites for high difficulty keywords. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Syndication and canonical tags across domains
Hello, I would love some confirmation on this matter. After all, is it OK to have canonicals across domains when syndicating content? I have found this old google blog article (from 2009) and was wondering if anything has changed since...
Algorithm Updates | | Koki.Mourao
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html Sincerely,0 -
Meta Titles and Descriptions
Is there no use of writing Meta Titles and Descriptions? I have them added to 100's of my articles but Google picks the actual title from the URL and title in the article only... any reason for this? How can i check if my Meta title and Description are being seen by Search engines but it will just take time to index the new metas may be few more months to change in Search results.
Algorithm Updates | | skandlikp90 -
Are titles on images still important for SEO?
We're doing research on image optimization and wanted to ask the MOZ community if you think having titles on images are still important for SEO if you have descriptive ALT text.
Algorithm Updates | | EvolveCreative0 -
Optimized site-wide internal links in footer - a problem?
Hello all - I am looking at a website with 8 heavily keyword optimized site-wide links in the footer. Yes, there are only 8 but it looks a bit spammy and I'm tempted to remove them. I imagine there's some possibility of a Google penalty too? What would your advice be? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Penalty for Mixing Microdata with Metadata
The folks that built our website have insisted on including microdata and metadata on our pages. What we end up with is something that looks like this in the header: itemprop="description" content="Come buy your shoes from us, we've got great shoes."> Seems to me that this would be a bad thing, however I can't find any info leaning one way or the other. Can anyone provide insight on this?
Algorithm Updates | | markcely0 -
Redesign, new content, new domain and 301 redirects (penalty?)
We merged our old webshops into one big project. After a few days we received our rankings back and traffic was coming in. Then suddenly we lost almost all rankings overnight. We did not use any wrong seo techniques and have unique content, written by our own writers. Is this a penalty or do we have to wait longer?
Algorithm Updates | | snorkel0 -
No-follow tags on links in the footer...do it or don't do it?
With some of the great reports SEOMoz has provided I've been able to start to take the correct steps towards fixing crawl issues, on-page issues, etc. One of my websites allows a customer to drill down to their specific state and then their city to apply for an auto loan. The SEOMoz reports told me I had too many links on these pages specifically. One of my ways to remedy this would be to add "no-follow" tags on the links in the footer as well as the links to the cities. Am I steering myself in the right/wrong direction? Should I be approaching this problem from a different perspective? Any help is greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | fergseo0