Meta Description Question
-
Is it ok to put your domain name in the meta description if that is the name of your company? so if my company name is BlaBla.com and I want to have a meta description like
Shop for your next Widget at BlaBla.com. We have Widget in 30 colors. Free shipping for orders over $50.
and I am obviosuly promoting the widget page is this ok. I am concerned that Google will not like the domain name in the meta description. After Peguin I am paranoid about my shadow.....LOL
-
Hi John,
Let me repeat, know of no evidence of Google penalizing a site because of keyword use in the meta description tag. So including it or removing it here will most likely have little impact on your rankings, although it may impact your CTR. Having the your site name in both your title and meta description should be fine, at least from a ranking perspective.
Here's a hypothetical situation where you can get into trouble:
70% of your inbound anchor text is all the same keyword
The keyword is the first word of your title tag, and appears 2-3x
The keyword is stuffed in your body text.Yes, it's hard NOT to have your keyword as anchor text when you have an exact match domain, but there seems to be at least some evidence of Google hitting sites that have overly optimized exact match anchor text, even for branded domains. The jury is still out, but diversifying your inbound anchor text seems like a smart strategy.
-
Thanks Cyrus I am not sure what you mean by
"The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about."
You mean not to abuse Anchor Text ? When you domain and company name are both an EDM (a great thing to have in the past) it is hard not to use it in Anchor. I guess what you are saying is dont use mysite.com as anchor instead use My Site or Here?
Oh right now I have mysite.com in the title and in many of the meta descriptions so it sounds like I should remove it from one or the other.
-
As Ben said, as far as we know Google doesn't use the meta description in it's ranking algorythm in any significant way. And I haven't seen any evidence changing in light of Penguin. So if it's natural for you to include it in your meta description, I'd encourage you to do so.
That said, if your domain is an exact match and it's a keyword you use a lot, I would encourage you to be careful in other areas of over-optimization (title tag, inbound links, keyword stuffing, etc.)
The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about.
Additionally, here's a couple of my favorite articles on Penguin:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
-
Very good points. I would like the company name (same as domain name) to go either in the title of the description but I like your idea to put it in the Description and re-think the title for a call to action.
In some cases Google is using info from my footer instead of the Meta Description in the SERPs?
-
Google doesn't really look at the meta description anymore so I wouldn't stress about it.
Although personally I'd not include the domain name in the meta description as you're probably mentioning the brand name in the title tag and it's going to appear directly above the description in tiny green writing anyway. So why not fill your title tag with things designed to encourage a high click through? Things like "Free shipping on orders over $50. Widgets available in 30 colours including popular colour 1, popular colour 2 and popular colur 3."
-
I am beginning to realize that being an SEO is like being a Doctor or a Lawyer. You get to practice your entire career and people actually tolerate that behavior.
-
Oh and thanks for letting me know that I am not alone staring at the dark object on the floor and wonder were it took so much traffic. Until April 24th I had no idea shadows were black and white and liked the cold.
-
I guess I should also mention that the name of this company is also an Exact Domain Match (EDM) of a great key word within this industry.
So I am now afraid that if I don't take out all my references to the actually company name out of the Description I will get penalized for stuffing.
Putting the name of the company is very typical for e-commerce company.
-
I don't foresee this being a problem.
At all.
And I know what you mean about being scared of your own shadow
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
-
titles length, URL length and meta descriptions on a subdomain effecting SEO on main domain?
Hi all, I am currently evaluating areas for optimization on my main domain. When doing this, Moz has identified multiple titles and urls that should be shortened and missing meta descriptions on my subdomain (a help center of sorts). As far as I am aware, we have not set up any "no-index" rules for this subdomain. Are these items affecting SEO on my main domain? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | annegretwidmer
Kasey0 -
Company name in Site Meta description?
Ok. So I know that you should have your company name in the site title, but is it all that important in the site description? The reason I ask is because I am competing with another company for the #1 position (I was number 1, now #2) that has an 8 character name and mine is 22 taking away from a great deal of real estate in my 150-160 character site description in which I could provide additional information describing my company. Should I remove my name in the site description enabling me to use more descriptive keywords and actionable text such as (Find, research, contact, professional, info) etc. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | photoseo10 -
H1 question
is it recommended to have the page title labeled as H1? or better to have page title and separate H1 ? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | gergi0 -
Blog Question
Hello! I try to add as much fresh content to my site weekly, I do also have a blog that I update 3 times per week. Will google crawl frequently if I am updating info on my wordpress hosted blog when my blog name is www.blog.mywebsite.com? and the sites name is www.mywebsite.com? Will they treat them as separate domains? Thank you!!
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Meta descriptions better empty or with duplicate content?
I am working with a yahoo store. Somehow all of the meta description fields were filled in with random content from throughout the store. For example, a black cabinet knob product page might have in its description field the specifications for a drawer slide. I don't know how this happened. We have had a programmer auto populate certain fields to get them ready for product feeds, etc. It's possible they screwed something up during that, this was a long time ago. My question. Regardless of how it happened. Is it better for me to have them wipe these fields entirely clean? Or, is it better for me to have them populate the fields with a duplicate of our text from the body. The site has about 6,500 pages so I have and will make custom descriptions for the more important pages after this process, but the workload to do them all is too much. So, nothing or duplicate content for the pages that likely won't receive personal attention?
On-Page Optimization | | dellcos1 -
Meta Keywords, Should I just remove them?
howdy guys, I am helping my father out with his SEO for his company. I am taking over the SEO helm so to speak and have to do a complete on site make over( offsite as well eventually soon) He has on every page meta keywords that are just stuffed with "money keywords" and they are the same on every page, Should i just delete them entirely and leave that attribute blank? Hope to hear back soon, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | david3050 -
Non-linked product short descriptions bad on ecommerce sites?
Hi, I have a question regarding SEO for ecommerce: Do you guys think it could be a bad thing to display non-linked short product descriptions of products on the home page and category pages? Can that cause cannibalism between different pages and non-optimal keyword targeting? I have a shop of which it's homepage tend to rank for some unintended phrases. Thank you, E
On-Page Optimization | | mrlolalot0