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.
Is it alright to repeat a keyword in the title tag?
-
I know at first glance, the answer to this is a resounding NO, that it can be construed as keyword stuffing,
but please hear me out. I am working on optimizing a client's website and although MOST of the title tags
can be optimized without repeating a keyword, occasionally I run into one where it doesn't read right if I
don't repeat the keyword.Here's an example:
Current title:
Photoshop on the Cloud | Adobe Photoshop Webinars | Company NameWhat I am considering using as the optimized title:
Adobe Photoshop on the Cloud | Adobe Photoshop Webinars | Company NameYes, I know both titles are longer than recommended. In both instances, only the company name gets
truncated so I am not too worried about that.So I guess what I want to know is this: Am I right in my original assumption that it is NEVER okay to
repeat keywords in a title tag or is it alright when it makes sense to do so? -
Hi again
In that case I would do this (just my opinion, again):
Webinar page: "Photoship Webinars | Company Name"
Individual webinar page: "Photoshop in the Cloud | Webinars | Company"Your doing a few things here - you're telling search engines - this is a page about Photoshop in the Cloud that is a webinar from this company. Users can read that title and quickly understand as well. I have always been a fan of the "Page Content | Category | Brand" title layout myself. That's just me.
I would also check out Schema.org for opportunities to markup your content on those webinar and individual webinar pages to better assist crawlers. Here's a good discussion on ProWebmasters.
Does this make sense?
-
In this instance, the Photoshop in the Cloud page is an individual webinar page within the overall
Adobe Photoshop Webinars section, hence my reasoning for including both in the title tag. -
Hi there
The best advice I could give here is if the keyword is relevant to the content on the page, then you should be fine. To me, "Photoshop on the Cloud | Photoshop Webinars" are two different concepts, so they should be titles on separate pages. Google and other search engines are good at associating websites/domains with keyword topics. So, in this case, your topic is more than likely Adobe Photoshop and variants of that topic.
Therefore, you shouldn't have to put these two keywords/phrases together in the same title because those two things should be their own pages, with a high level concept like "Photoshop Made Easy | Company Name" or something like that on your homepage (not trying to name your homepage for you).
Along with the resource above, check out:
Title Tags (Moz)
URLs (Moz - for structure based on content)
Meta Descriptions (Moz - once your get those pages set up, work on your CTR from search)Hope this helps! Let me know if you need more help! Good luck!
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
-
Should I disable the indexing of tags in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a client that is publishing 7 or 8 news articles and posts each month. I am optimising selected posts and I have found that they have been adding a lot of tags (almost like using hashtags) . There are currently 29 posts but already 55 tags, each of which has its own archive page, and all of which are added to the site map to be indexed (https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/sitemap_index.xml). I came across an article (https://crunchify.com/better-dont-use-wordpress-tags/) that suggested that tags add no value to SEO ranking, and as a consequence Wordpress tags should not be indexed or included in the sitemap. I haven't been able to find much more reliable information on this topic, so my question is - should I get rid of the tags from this website and make the focus pages, posts and categories (redirecting existing tag pages back to the site home page)? It is a relatively new websites and I am conscious of the fact that category and tag archive pages already substantially outnumber actual content pages (posts and news) - I guess this isn't optimal. I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks wMfojBf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCN-SBWD0 -
Video titles and descriptions
Hi everyone, I have a question about embedding videos on a website: if you optimize the title and description for the video in Youtube, will these be taken into account for the ranking of the page where the video is embedded? Or will only the Youtube link for the video show in SERP's, instead of the page itself? I've read in a post of Phil Nottingham that it's usually not a good idea to embed a Youtube video on your own site, but use Wistia instead, exactly to avoid cannibalisation of your own rankings. Is this correct? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
Bad SEO Practice: in title tag?
Greetings, I just discovered that some of our content was produced with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
tags in the title tag. Example: <title>Diabetes Symptoms <br> In Women Over 40</title> My gut says this is bad for SEO, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on the web, so I thought I would ask the community of gurus here at Moz. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric0 -
Yoast seo title question
I was referred to this plugin and have found it to be the most irritating and poorly designed plugin in the world. I want to be able to set my titles without it changing my page headers as well. For instance - If I set my title to be "This is my article name | site name" it will make my H1 tag read the same. I do not want or desire this nonsense. Why would they think this is something wise? Why would I want my site name on every single H1 tag on my site? How can I fix this? I only want my title to be my title. I want my H1 tag to remain the post/page name that I define in wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
H2 Tag Backlink - is this safe?
I have found that my site is getting a link from a good site, but my concern is that the link is in a H2 tag in the footer of the front page of the site Would getting a link from a site wrapped in H2 tags be safe? The anchor is my sites brand name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Does City In Title Tag Inhibit Broader Reach?
I use our city/state in the majority of our title tags and consequently we do very well locallly for the majority of terms on our ecommerce site. I'm wondering however, if this "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state? If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours? The city/state is last in the string on the title: Blue Widgets - Our Company in City, State Thanks for any insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0