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.
Unique page URLs and SEO titles
-
www.heartwavemedia.com / Wordpress / All in One SEO pack
I understand Google values unique titles and content but I'm unclear as to the difference between changing the page url slug and the seo title.
For example:
I have an about page with the url "www.heartwavemedia.com/about" and the SEO title San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | About
I've noticed some of my competitors using url structures more like "www.competitor.com/san-francisco-video-production-about"
Would it be wise to follow their lead? Will my landing page rank higher if each subsequent page uses similar keyword packed, long tail url? Or is that considered black hat?
If advisable, would a url structure that includes "san-francisco-video-production-_____" be seen as being to similar even if it varies by one word at the end?
Furthermore, will I be penalized for using similar SEO descriptions ie. "San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | Portfolio" and San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | Contact" or is the difference of one word "portfolio" and "contact" sufficient to read as unique?
Finally...am I making any sense? Any and all thoughts appreciated...
-
Have you tried tools such as pingdom, page speed insights or yslow? These can all give you a good idea where to start.
-
I'd more than likely go for something different on each page. Make sure you're describing the page content accurately in the title.
You don't need to include your brand in any of the titles. Some people believe it's better to have the brand name, some don't. Amazon for example - they're a strong, well known brand - so it makes sense to include the brand name as it can encourage click throughs from Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). For a business like yours I wouldn't think it'd make a big difference either way. As you're targeting local customers, it could result in extra exposure for your brand name if you include it, though the longer a title tag the less emphasis is given to each keyword in the SERPs - so that's a small reason not to include it. If you go back to what I said about thinking about the user, then you'd have the brand name on the homepage and about page for definite, but other pages - it probably doesn't matter so much. As you noticed on another thread, sometimes Google will add your brand name anyway! You could also consider how people's bookmarks display, but again I'll say - don't worry about this too much!
In terms of your question about speed, there are a few resources you can put your URLs into that will give you feedback and recommendations. Here are 2:
tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ -
Thanks, Alex. Yeah, my instinct was that the keyword packed urls were spammy so I'll keep them simple.
I feel like I'm beginning to wrap my head around this. So to clarify further...
If I'm trying to get my home page to rank for "San Francisco Video Production" should I not include that phrase at all in my title tags or is it still advisable providing it varies slightly and clearly relates the intended purpose of the page?
For example:
San Francisco Video Production Portfolio | Heartwave Media
or would it make more sense to let that term be exclusive to the home page and do something more like:
Corporate and Commercial Video Portfolio | Heartwave Media
Right now I have:
San Francisco Video Production | Portfolio | Heartwave Media
PS:
Do I even need to include my brand in the titles outside the landing page?
-
How can I make my page load faster. I believe it's a bit slow...
-
"I have an about page with the url "www.heartwavemedia.com/about" and the SEO title San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | About"
I'd say the URL you have already is perfect. For the "SEO title" (title tag) I'd go with "About Heartwave Media" - the unique part of the title tag should be at the start.
Think about what is best for the human visitors to your website, and not the search engine crawlers. People expect an "about" url to be at www.example.com/about or www.example.com/aboutus - it's also memorable and easier to type in. I've always said this is the best way, and Google is getting smarter at ranking content that is useful for searchers: http://moz.com/blog/be-the-result-that-google-wants-to-rank
If every URL on your page had "san-francisco-video-production-" in it, it's not user-friendly, and it looks spammy, so to Google it's definitely going to look spammy, either now or at some point in the future.
Also be aware of keyword cannibilisation. You want search engines to know your website is about video production, but you don't want to confuse them over which page they should rank highest. This is an old article but still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization It's fine to mention "video production" and variations of that theme throughout your website, but be aware of the cannibilisation issue. If you think it's most important to rank for "San Francisco Video Production" then that should be your homepage title, arguably with your brand name at the end.
-
Hey Keith,
Let's discuss things one by one
1. Title Tags
- Too long! It must be around 60 Characters with spaces (Some Suggests 70 as well). So, try to fix it
- Be unique for every page. Like for About Page, you can use "About | San Francisco's Leading Video Production Company". For Services "Video Production Services San Francisco". Search more keywords for your business (Google Keywords Tool)
- Use your brand as blog title. Using keyword is not very recommended as it leads to increase length and over -optimization
2. Meta Description
- Unique description of around 160 words with proper optimization of keywords is ideal
- Your Meta descriptions are not optimized at moment. Please optimize them
3. URL Structure
- Optimized URL is not all about placing keywords in URL
- Deliver authority to your pages and they will start to rank
I hop this will help!
Regards
-
I've already crawled the site. Quite a few titles appear to be rather long. Most of the titles use San Francisco Video Production.
Only include the keyword in the title if that's what the page is about. Having a keyword in the slug is a good idea, again just don't go overboard. One page should suffice, but that alone won't guarantee the first page (No one and nothing guarantees first page results).
You have to look at domain age as well. Does one of your competitors have a couple of years on you? Do they have ten years on you? That's a big thing.
Where are you're competitors getting links? Are these links good, will they drive traffic? That's another concern.
I like to put page speed/usability in the first order, but many people say it's second order. Does your site load well/fast? What can you do to reduce page load speed?
These are some really basic things you have to consider. If you've answered them properly, your situation should improve.
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
-
What is the best strategy to SEO Discontinued Products on Ecommerce Sites?
RebelsMarket.com is a marketplace for alternative fashion. We have hundreds of sellers who have listed thousands of products. Over 90% of the items do not generate any sales; and about 40% of the products have been on the website for over 3+ years. We want to cleanup the catalog and remove all the old listings that older than 2years that do not generate any sales. What is the best practice for removing thousands of listings an Ecommerce site? do we 404 these products and show similar items? Your help and thoughts is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimJ3 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Bad for SEO to have two very similar websites on the same server?
Is it bad for SEO to have two very similar sites on the same server? What's the best way to set this up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sir0 -
Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept? If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag? If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Rollover design & SEO
After reading this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/designing-for-seo some questions came up from my developers. In the article it says "One potential solution to this problem is a mouse-over. Initially when viewed, the panel will look as it does on the left hand side (exactly as the designer want it), yet when a user rolls over the image the panel changes into what you see on the right hand side (exactly what the SEO wants)." My developers say" Having text in the rollovers is almost like hiding text and everyone knows in SEO that you should never hide text. "In the article he explains that it is not hidden text since its visible & readable by the engines.What are everyone's thoughts on this? Completely acceptable or iffy?Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Ever seen a black hat SEO hack this sneaky?
A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdamThompson0