Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Research & Trends
    3. White Hat / Black Hat SEO
    4. Starting every page title with the keyword

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    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.

    Starting every page title with the keyword

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO
    3
    6
    1015
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • xcyte
      xcyte last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • DougRoberts
        DougRoberts @xcyte last edited by

        Best practice is great starting point, but you need to work out what works for your audience, your offerings and your business.

        For instance, having a call to action in your title can make a positive difference ("find" is a bit generic, but things like save, download the guide, buy now, etc can work, if it connects with the searchers intent.)

        Luckily page titles are pretty easy to test - you'll need to keep an eye on your rankings and traffic and measure click-throughs for a suitable period depending on the search volume and taking into account any seasonality etc. As well as the traffic you receive, also look at the conversion rate too - especially important if you're testing for intent.

        You can always tried a couple of variations in Adwords to see how they perform, especially for you more important keywords / pages.

        The approach you take regarding your titles also depends on the type of page, the nature of the business, your specific business goals, the strength of your brand etc.

        Take a good look at the other sites appearing in the SERPS and the titles/descriptions they're using. Put yourself in the place of your audience and try to see what's going to work and what isn't and how you might be able to differentiate your page from the rest.

        Also remember that titles have to work in conjunction with the description. While the description isn't used for ranking, it can take some of the load of the title when it comes to supporting click-throughs.

        Another point to consider is that Titles aren't just used in search engine results, but also when the page is shared / linked to etc. Depending on your site, you may want to adopt a slightly different strategy for your blog content than you use on a product catalogue for instance.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • xcyte
          xcyte @DougRoberts last edited by

          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?

          DougRoberts 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • DougRoberts
            DougRoberts last edited by

            While you obviously want to get your keywords into your title, and the general wisdom is the nearer the front, the better but it's not the whole story.

            As well as optimising your titles for keyword relevancy/rankings you should also consider optimising for click-through.

            The page title and the description used in the snippet in the search results are likely to be the first thing your visitors/customers are likely to see and if nobody is clicking on your entry in the search results it doesn't matter where you rank.

            Think of your snippet as a small-ad or adwords snippet. It's got to provide a compelling reason for someone to click on your link. Can you find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors and stand out? Can you do anything to give people confidence that they're going to find what they are after if they click on your link.

            A well written title can punch above it's weight in the search results. (Like wise, a bad , un-engaging or spammy looking title can undermine your efforts.)

            Also remember that your page may also rank for keywords that you're not optimising for, these may be long tail keywords with higher intent than the more generic keywords so make sure you look at the keywords sending traffic to each landing page (even low volumes) and look for themes/topics/intent you can optimise your pages around.

            If you're targeting multiple locations (Photographers miami and photographers orlando for instance) then you'll need to make sure you avoid duplicate/thin content. How can you make these pages relevant to that location...

            Think about the intent and commerciality when considering your keywords. If I'm searching for "photographers in orlando" am I looking for camera equipment or am I more likely to be looking for a photographer to take my picture and if this is the case - why would I want to buy any camera equipment!

            xcyte 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
            • xcyte
              xcyte @danatanseo last edited by

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

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • danatanseo
                danatanseo last edited by

                If you are starting every page title with "Photographers Miami" then I think that's probably not the best because you'll be trying to target the same keywords with every page. If, on the other hand your page titles look more like this:

                Photopgrahers Miami | Cameras & Accessories

                Photopgrahers Orlando | Cameras & Accessories

                I think these are perfectly fine. You might notice that exchanged the word "equipment" with "cameras.: Equipment could mean anything. I assume you are selling cameras, so why not say so? Also I removed the word "Find." Save your call to action for your Meta description. That word "Find" is not helping your title at all. However, it's perfect for a meta description.

                Those are my thoughts. I hope they help!

                xcyte 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • HuptechWebseo

                  Robots.txt file in Shopify - Collection and Product Page Crawling Issue

                  Hi, I am working on one big eCommerce store which have more then 1000 Product. we just moved platform WP to Shopify getting noindex issue. when i check robots.txt i found below code which is very confusing for me. **I am not getting meaning of below tags.** Disallow: /collections/+ Disallow: /collections/%2B Disallow: /collections/%2b Disallow: /blogs/+ Disallow: /blogs/%2B Disallow: /blogs/%2b I can understand that my robots.txt disallows SEs to crawling and indexing my all product pages. ( collection/*+* ) Is this the query which is affecting the indexing product pages? Please explain me how this robots.txt work in shopify and once my page crawl and index by google.com then what is use of Disallow: Thanks.

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo
                  0
                • RizwanAkbar

                  Dfferent domains on same ip address ranking for the same keywords, is it possible?

                  Hello, I want to ask if two domains which r hosted on the same server and have the same ip ( usually happens with shared hosts ) tries to rank for the same keywords in google, does the same ip affects them or not.

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RizwanAkbar
                  0
                • CFSSEO

                  Duplicate keywords in URL?

                  Is there such a thing as keyword stuffing URLs?  Such as a domain name of turtlesforsale.com having a directory called turtles-for-sale that houses all the pages on the site.  Every page would start out with turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/. Good or bad idea?  The owner is hoping to capitalize on the keywords of turtles for sale being in the URL twice and ranking better for that reason.

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO
                  0
                • jaspercurry

                  One page with multiple sections - unique URL for each section

                  Hi All, This is my first time posting to the Moz community, so forgive me if I make any silly mistakes. A little background: I run a website that for a company that makes custom parts out of specialty materials. One of my strategies is to make high quality content about all areas of these specialty materials to attract potential customers - pretty strait-forward stuff. I have always struggled with how to structure my content; from a usability point of view, I like just having one page for each material, with different subsections covering covering different topical areas. Example: for a special metal material I would have one page with subsections about the mechanical properties, thermal properties, available types, common applications, etc. Basically how Wikipedia organizes its content. I do not have a large amount of content for each section, but as a whole it makes one nice cohesive page for each material. I do use H tags to show the specific sections on the page, but I am wondering if it may be better to have one page dedicated to the specific material properties, one page dedicated to specific applications, and one page dedicated to available types. What are the communities thoughts on this? As a user of the website, I would rather have all of the information on a single, well organized page for each material. But what do SEO best practices have to say about this? My last thought would be to create a hybrid website (I don't know the proper term). Have a look at these examples from Time and Quartz. When you are viewing a article, the URL is unique to that page. However, when you scroll to the bottom of the article, you can keep on scrolling into the next article, with a new unique URL - all without clicking through to another page. I could see this technique being ideal for a good web experience while still allowing me to optimize my content for more specific topics/keywords. If I used this technique with the Canonical tag would I then get the best of both worlds? Let me know your thoughts! Thank you for the help!

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jaspercurry
                  0
                • Grant-Westfield

                  Should I delete Meta Keywords from a website?

                  Hi Guys, I've been reading various posts on the Q&A section here at Moz about Meta keywords. I understand that meta keywords are not relevant with Google and that Bing signals this as spam. I'm optimising existing websites which already have meta keywords in the html coding. My question is: If I delete ALL meta keyword coding will this have any negative impact whatsoever? Thanks Mozers Jason 🙂

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Grant-Westfield
                  0
                • theseolab

                  Whats up with google scrapping keywords metrics

                  I've done a bit of reading on google now "scrapping" the keywords metrics from the analytics. I am trying to understand why the hell they would do that? To force people to run multiple adwords campaign to setup different keywords scenario? It just doesn't make sense to me...If i am a blogger or i run an ecommerce site...and i get a lot of visit regarding a particular post through a keyword they clicked on organically. Why would Google wanna hide this from people? It's great Data for us to carry on writing relevant content that appeals to people and therefore serves the need of those same people? There is the idea of doing White Hat SEO and focus on getting strong links and great content etc... How do we know we have great content if we are not seeing what is appealing to people in terms of keywords and how they found us organically... Is google trying to squash SEO as a profession? What do you guys think?

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theseolab
                  0
                • LexisClick1

                  Would having a + plus sign between keywords in meta title have an effect on SEO?

                  I have seen one of my clients' competitors do this in their meta title and it got me a little intrigued... I understand that google uses the + sign as an operator in adwords, and to a certain extent, as a search tool, but would it help or make any difference to the SEO in the meta title/data  (eg. 'SEO+Marketing+Services')? Thanks

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LexisClick1
                  0
                • CaseyDaline

                  Off-page SEO and link building

                  Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked  about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.