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.
Title Tag : use comma, pipe or colon (:)
-
Hi,
If Title has two and three keywords then which one is better option to separate them either with comma or pipe or colon.
Example : Arvixe Review, Coupons (Jun 2015) and Uptime Report (I used (,) as a separator)
Arvixe Review is primary keywords and Coupons and Uptime are secondary keywords. Aim is rank on keywords like Arvixe Review, Arvixe Coupons and Arvixe Uptime.
Also, including current month and year with Title tag and it will change every month. Its means every month our title is changed.
Is this effect in SEO?Suggest best possible title for keywords like Arvixe Review, Coupons (Jun 2015) and Uptime Report.
Rajiv
-
Re: pipe or hyphen in browser title, does anyone know which is the more accessible option?
GOV.UK, a leader in accessibility, uses hyphens... -
Below is a copy and paste of keywords relating to Arvixe obtained from Semrush. You should check them. Coupon is very competitive, so I have skipped that. So I would suggest:-
Arvixe Hosting Review | Arvixe Coupon | Sitegeek
or
Arvixe Hosting Review | Arvixe Uptime Report | Sitegeek
You should include your brand name as google usually will do regardless. It really is a personal decision as you know your brand / company best. Hope this helps.
Keyword Volume CPC SERP source arvixe coupon 480 18.85 arvixe web hosting 170 6.10 arvixe control panel 90 24.38 arvixe hosting review 70 11.61 arvixe cpanel login -
Page is https://www.sitegeek.com/arvixe
and want to target Arvixe Review, Arvixe Coupons and Arvixe Uptime Reportshould title ? Arvixe Review | Arvixe Coupons (Jun 2015) | Arvixe Uptime Report
or
Arvixe Review | Coupons (Jun 2015) | Uptime Report
or
Arvixe Review : Arvixe Coupons (Jun 2015) and Current Uptime Report
Arvixe Review is our primary keywords.
-
The word Arvixe - would not be highly competitive - so need to use that 3 times. Coupons is competitive.
The below is the title that appears if I google Arvixe
Web Hosting | Shared Hosting | Website Hosting by Arvixe
Are you changing the Title to the home page or is it a new page? The Coupon page? The most common search term according to Semrush is "Arvixe Coupon". The above suggestions appear to be targeting 3 different topics rather than one broadly, like your current title. Need some more info on what page you are targeting and why - otherwise could be leading you down the garden path.
-
there are lot of variations in using comma, title or colon. I do google search with following keywords :
1. hotels review
2. cheap flights
3. airlines review
4. mobile recharge
5. mobile review
-
thanks John!
As you suggested that pipe is best for both SEO and clickability. So options should be as follow:
1. Arvixe Review | Coupons (Jun 2015) | Uptime Report
Note - we should use 'Arvixe with all there keywords . Even, few SEO research shows that a keywords should not be duplicated in Title. whats your take? we can use in such cases?
2. Arvixe Review | Arvixe Coupons (Jun 2015) | Arvixe Uptime Report
3. Arvixe Review | Arvixe Discount Coupons | Arvixe Uptime Report
Please Tell us which one would be better title.
-
You are always right... so I got confused! All good...
-
Hi John
Yes, I am not disagreeing at all and sorry if that was portrayed somehow - especially if I gave a "free for all" point of view - this was not my intent. I was just referencing Matt from the perspective of "does it matter?" in Rajiv's question.
I personally like pipes in my titles. As long as it's clean, speaks to the content, and consistent across the site in format, you should be all good.
Be good!
-
Patrick
The company I work for specializes in CTR on search results - we run complex experiments on them ie 30-40 today alone. There is a difference between pipes and hyphens on CTR. It is small but it is statistically significant. Sure it is irrelevant to most but for big boys chasing keywords like "car insurance" etc it is vital as each click is has such high cost in competitive spaces.
Matt Cutts noted the CTR factor between them as well. I do not believe it makes any difference on SEO except in so far as it uses more pixels. So maybe we agree, but a clean tidy looking title that looks professional to the customer does have an impact on CTR.
-
Hi there
This is going to require some research about your audience and what they may be searching for. No one knows your audience and business better than you, so you need to make sure that whatever you are putting in the titles are both the best representations of your user's searches and your website's content. Be natural, be real, and be specific.
When it comes to pipes and hyphens, it doesn't matter. Here's a video from Matt Cutts on the subject.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
We do alot of experiments for clients on the difference between pipes, colons and hyphens.
99 out of 100 the pipe is the preferred separator. Generally the pipe is best for both SEO and Clickability. This is as the pipe also uses less pixels. Recommend as follows:-
Most Important Key Word | Second Keyword | Brandname ( no more than 512 pixels in length or otherwise it truncates).
If you detail a couple of options I can probably tell you what is likely best.
-
You are fine using any of them and it's down to personal preference, although I use a pipe because it is clearer when looking at the title. It also depends on the Title as well - sometimes a pipe won't do the job and you need to use a comma.
Also, including current month and year with Title tag and it will change every month. Its means every month our title is changed
I would try to avoid this. You don't want the same page title to keep changing. By all means add something to the page that states when it was last updated, but I wouldn't use the Page Title for this.
-Andy
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 if i dont use an H1, but rather, h2 with multiple keywords.
the reason i dont want to use h1 is because i can have only one h1, however if i use several h2s. is it gonna help me rank? bacause google likes h1 more than h2, is google gonna give more priority or same priority to h2., and if that priority is gonna be less, what will be the percentage of that lessness? for ex: h1 gets 90 score if my h1 is missing how much score my h2 will get out of hundred(i know there is no such metric but i am just wondering anyways)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Page title optimisation - Does suffix keywords matters?
Hi Moz community, We can see in many of the page titles; "brand & keyword" go after every topic like..... "best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles". Do Google count this suffix as any other word in page title or give low preference just because it has been repeated across every single page? What if the "keyword" is repeated with topic and brand name as well. I mean which one of the below 2 page titles gonna workout better in correlation with keyword and website authority ? best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles best tiles for kitchen | vertigo Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Can I leave off HTTP/HTTPS in a canonical tag?
We are working on moving our site to HTTPS and I was asked by my dev team if it is required to declare HTTP or HTTPS in the canonical tag? I know that relative URL's are acceptable but cannot find anything about HTTP/HTTPS. Example of what they would like to do Has anyone done this? Any reason to not leave off the protocol?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
I have deleted a couple of posts from my blog, im using wordpress but still showing in the search how to delete?
Hey Guys, So I deleted a couple of pages from my blog, and when I search the keyword it is still showing do you guys have any idea how I can completed delete this from the search? Here is the page http://bit.ly/1cRR4qJ
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
Hi Guys QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ. 1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content. Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to **ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat ** If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well? How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make? Any insight into this would be great! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Benefit of using 410 gone over 404 ??
It seems like it takes Google Webmaster Tools to forever realize that some pages, well, are just gone. Truth is, the 30k plus pages in 404 errors, were due to a big site URL architecture change. I wonder, is there any benefit of using 410 GONE as a temporary measure to speed things up for this case? Or, when would you use a 410 gone? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Using an auto directory submission
Has anyone used easysubmits.com and what's your experience with it? Any other directory submission or link building tools that help automate and manage the process like easysubmits.com says they can do? I'm just looking at it currenlty and wanted to hear others thoughts before I get taken in by some black hat method that hurts my websites instead.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Twinbytes0