Best practice for the brand name in Page Titles
-
We are considering changing the way we treat our brand (TTS) in our page title tags. In MOZ I found the following advice:
Optimal Format
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary KeywordAre these of equal merit or is the former (Primary keyword | Brand) the better route?
Currently we use the second version - 'Brand | Primary Keyword' - but we are proposing to shift to 'Primary Keyword | Brand'. We currently get an awful lot of brand traffic that converts very well so I need to be sure that no harm is done as a minimum.
All views appreciated. Many thanks.
Jon
-
I agree with Phillip,
If your site is established and ranking well for brand terms, then making this change shouldn't effect the over all branded rankings, especially seeing as your not taking the brand out completely.
The keywords should ideally be the main focus of the page, thus having your keywords in the front of the title should boost rankings for those targeted terms.
I have always used and recommended using: Main Keyword | Secondary Keyword - Brand Name
On a side note: Something i recently started noticing (I don't have any resources to refer to) is that quite a few of our competitors don't use the "Keyword | Keyword - Brand" formula, instead they use "Great [Keyword] deals from leading [keyword] suppliers - Brand Name" and they seem to be ranking really well. (More descriptive words that entice users)
Perhaps Google is starting to prefer "natural" looking titles (including stop words, adjectives etc) and not putting much extra value on "optimized" title tag formula's (Keyword | Keyword - Brand) This is just a thought and haven't researched it much.
Greg
-
I believe the best convention for brand is the _Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name. _Typically, unless your brand is something that is the search term (Nike Tennis shoes, etc.) you want it last. If people who already know your brand are searching for you, they will find you IMO. (You have TTS in the domain and in every url as the result of that already).
To me, working with clients, I want them to get the new customers to their site where possible with SEO. As the result of that desire, for title tags we use the convention I put here. People searching for music sets for example, may not know your brand, and you want the optimal opportunity to rank for that term. In that case the first convention is best. But......as to going through and changing all title tags and leaving all else the same, I am not sure I would spend time on that. If I am optimizing the site and doing multiple things to get it better for key terms, I would.
I hope that helps a bit,
Robert
-
The brand name coming first is generally seen with big brands - Amazon, Walmart, etc. The reasoning I've heard is that it lets the consumer easily know they're shopping there and generates trusts. And obviously brands like that don't really have to worry about trying to rank for a particular keyword.
Unless you're super well known, I'd keep it Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name.
-
This change should pose no problems. But I understand if you're hesitant since you're already ranking. How about testing this on a few dozen pages or 20-30% of your pages? (I don't know how large your site is and which implementation is more realistic). See whether this change affects you positively or not and push it to the entire site after a couple of months.
But in general, such a slight change should not pose any problem. It might result in a temporary shift downwards but this has always recovered in my experience.
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
-
One Page Design / Single Product Page
I have been working in a project. Create a framework for multi pages that I have So here is the case
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Roman-Delcarmen
Most of them are single page product / one page design wich means that I dont have many pages to optimize. All this sites/ pages follow the rules of a landing page optimization because my main goals is convert as many users as I can. At this point I need to optimize the SEO, the basic stuff such as header, descriptions, tittles ect. But most of my traffic is generated by affiliates, which is good beacuse I dont have to worrie to generate traffic but if the affiliate network banned my product, then I lose all my traffic. Put all my eggs in the same basket is not a good idea. Im not an seo guru so that is the reason Im asking whic strategies and tactics can give me results. All kind of ideas are welcome1 -
Best practice to redirect http to https
I have an SSL certificate on our domain but at times some search results still list the HTTP version. Clicking on this then warns the user about security and they leave. To avoid this I am using this in the htaccess file to redirect all HTTP visits to the https version. RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavpeds
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/$1 [R,L] Is this ok? I notice on Moz toolbar it give a 302 temporary redirect I am thinking this isn't good and needs to be a 301 maybe? What is the best practice in this situation?1 -
Landing pages, are my pages competing?
If I have identified a keyword which generates income and when searched in google my homepage comes up ranked second, should I still create a landing page based on that keyword or will it compete with my homepage and cause it to rank lower?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Great_Projects0 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
Duplicate Content Dilemma for Category and Brand Pages
Hi, I have a online shop with categories such as: Trousers Shirts Shoes etc. But now I'm having a problem with further development.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
I'd like to introduce brand pages. In this case I would create new categories for Brand 1, Brand 2, etc... The text on categories and brand pages would be unique. But there will be an overlap in products. How do I deal with this from a duplicate content perspective? I'm appreciate your suggestions. Best, Robin0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
Removing hundreds of old product pages - Best process
Hi guys, I've got a site about discounts/specials etc. A few months ago we decided it might be useful to have shop specials in PDF documents "pulled" and put on the site individually so that people could find the specials easily. This resulted in over 2000 new pages being added to the site over a few weeks (there are lots of specials).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
However, 2 things have happened: 1 - we have decided to go in another direction with the site and are no longer doing this
2 - the specials that were uploaded have now ended but the pages are still live Google has indexed these pages already. What would be the best way to "deal" with these pages? Do I just delete them, do I 301 them to the home page? PS the site is build on wordpress. Any ideas as I am at a complete loss. Thanks,
Marc0 -
Category Pages up - Product Pages down... what would help?
Hi I mentioned yesterday how one of our sites was losing rank on product pages. What steps do you take to improve the SERPS of product pages, in this case home/category/product is the tree. There isn't really any internal linking, except one link from the category page to each product, would setting up a host of internal links perhaps "similar products" linking them together be a place to start? How can I improve my ranking of these more deeply internal pages? Not just internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0