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
-
Google URL Shortener- Should I use one or multiple???
I have a client with a number of YouTube videos. I'm using Google URL Shortner to allow the link to show in the YouTube text (as its a long URL). Many of these links go to the same page ex .com/services-page Should I use a single short URL for each video linking to the .com/services-page or should they be unique each time? If unique, would Google possibly think I'm trying to manipulate results? Thanks in advance. I'm just not sure on this one and hope someone knows best practice on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgordon1 -
Seeing URLS indexed that we don't want how do we approach this?
Hey guys, I have seen a few pages in the SERPS that are appearing from my site, some of these pages urls are actually ajax to refresh the buttons on our site... If these are important to our site but don't need to show up in the serps results can anyone recommend anything? Should I remove the urls? Or exclude them from the sitemap? or noindex? Any advice would be much appreciated thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Does Backlinks from User Profile Page Still Matter
Though, lot of algorithmic changes, updates have happened. However, backlinks from quality source or trusted sites has hardly lost its importance and thats why Open SIte Explorer or Majestic seo is still there to find quality of backlinks, trust factor and authority factor of the backlinks. I need to know does having backlink (dofollow) from Profile Page - still matters and if yes - will a do follow backlink from Moz Profile Page or any authority site or forum page, having dofollow link from user profile page - does it still count as a mark to authority of your site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
Negative SEO impacting client rankings - How to combat negative linking?
I have a client which have been losing rankings for the key term "sell gold" in Google AU. However, while doing some investigating I realized that we have been receiving links from bad neighborhoods such as porn, bogus .edu sites as well as some pharmaceutical sites. We have identified this as negative SEO and have moved forward to disavow the links in Google. However, I would like to know what other measures can be taken to combat this type of negative SEO linking? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dancape0 -
Google Results Pages. after the bomb
So, ever since Google "went nuclear" a few weeks ago I have seen major fluctuations in search engine results pages. Basically what I am seeing is a settling down and RE-inclusion of some of my web properties. Basically I had a client affected by the hack job initially, but about a week later I not only saw my original ranking restored but a litany of other long tails appeared. I wasn't using any shady link techniques but did have considerable article distribution that MAY have connected me inadvertently to some of the "bad neighborhoods." The website itself is a great site with original relevant content, so if it is possible, Google definitely recognized some error in their destructive ranking adjustment and is making good on it for those sites that did not deserve the penalty. Alternatively, it could just be random Google reordering and I got lucky. What are your experiences with the updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheGrid0 -
What do you think of Theme pyramids for SEO?
Hi, Just been reading up on theme pyramids, I have seen these before but found a good article on the subject going into quite some detail. http://www.canonicalseo.com/theme-pyramids/ Using the word 'Pyramid' does scream black hat to me but looking at the structure, this must be the best way for internal linking. Even the keyword structure looks good, Example: homepage - shoes category - red shoes sub category - size 7 red shoes Building anchor text links for shoes, red shoes or size 7 red shoes will benefit all 3 terms. Negative/Positive comments please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Contacted by an SEO company..
We have been contacted by a free SEO company, who seem to use your domain and create articles for you on your site, linking to other relevant sites, while other relevant sites link to yours. All they ask is a small link on your homepage. An excerpt of the instructions are: Download the attached files in a folder to be uploaded to your server (public_html) folder Set 777 permission to the folder. This allows our script to work on your site Add the "site wide" link on your homepage, as well as on the inner pages, the same way we do in the article section. Implement the "site wide" link following the instructions on the README.txt file Copy the script on the file or you can provide us with a temporary FTP access to your server and we will do it for you. Please note that if you can upload our folder to your site within 48 hours, you will be eligible to receive 20 bonus links for your SEO campaign. Should we tread carefully?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | filarinskis0 -
My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!
On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page. The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoreyTisdale0