meta tags? - I will give an example of a forum I made, used for a while and then sold a site called

saltedm8

I will give an example of a forum I made, used for a while and then sold

a site called recipebite ( please bear in mind I am using the .co.uk version of google for this )

if I type in recipebite ( which is the brand ) it comes up top in the search results - of course - recipebite - Google Search

I s.e.o'ed it before I sold it and the new owners have not changed the title or description

the title is 'Recipes and Food & Cooking Forums'

when I type in food forums food forums - Google Search it is 3rd

when I type in cooking forums cooking forums - Google Search it is second

when I type in recipe forums recipe forums - Google Search it is second again

what I am saying here is that the reference to the brand is still there if you look for it, as it comes up as the first result.. but its title is obviously right as the site in itself is not very popular and does not have a huge amount of incoming links but can still make it in the position it is in.

That is why I say its wasteful as if your brand is in your url and you typed in your brand, the search engines will still find it.. obviously the title does have to be relevant and descriptive, but would you not class 'Recipes and Food & Cooking Forums' as looking 'spammy' ?

but it still makes it where I want it to, so in summery it has its 'branding' should you search for it, but it also has its normal search engine results without wasting space in the title tag.

of course, I am not an expert at s.e.o, but I can tell you what I have seen based on my own previous results and based on research and advice from s.e.o experts.

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Mike Hopley

I suppose my point is that titles are not just there for SEO. They are also there for users, and they can also be used to help build a brand.

If you view every decision only through the lens of SEO, then you will end up with a crap website. This is probably the thing I find most irritating about (many) SEOs: their refusal to acknowledge non-SEO aspects of a website. It's just another example of experts wanting their particular discipline to take precedence over all other considerations.

By "building a brand", I do not mean getting your brand to show up #1 on Google when someone searches for it (that's trivial). I mean raising awareness of your brand among a relevant community. Including your brand name in page titles is just one part of doing this.

I'm not saying this would always be the right decision; I could be persuaded against it, in specific circumstances. But my default approach would be to include the brand as part of my title.

In any case, I think it's unreasonable to say that including your brand in the title is "wrong". That's letting SEO dominate your mindset, to the exclusion of all other thought.

In your example, I would personally have gone with "Recipes and Food & Cooking Forums | RecipeBite", or some variation (RecipeBite.com, Recipe Bite -- whatever your preferred form of the brand is; and a dash separator also works). Alternatively, for the home page only, I might put the branding first, or even on its own.

saltedm8

SEO is the dominating factor in building websites as far as I am concerned, obviously it has to make sense and be relevant to the idea of your site, but if you want to get anywhere SEO has to take priory above branding... as without good SEO, your 'branding' would never be noticed anyway...

I am not saying that branding is wrong, but it is wrong for the title tag as that is not what it was meant for.. a title and description of a page is not the branding of a site.

If you are placing 'branding' in the title of your site, you are removing the strength of your actual 'researched keywords' meaning that your position in the search engines will not be as good as it could be.

obviously there are exceptions as stated before, if your branding is keyword relevant and describes the content of the page, but that's about it

a title is not branding, its a description of the content to let users know what is on the page, in plain and simple terms search engines look for relevancy ( amongst other things ) and have no concept of branding.

its more useful to be shown a description of the page rather than some obsolete 'brand name' as you were looking for something that relates to the page in question and not an advertisement, awareness comes with content, if its good, they will come back, if not they wont.. the trick is to grab their interest 'on the page' and make them remember you 'on the page' - that is where your branding should be.

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Mike Hopley

I'm afraid I'm wearying of this conversation, as your position is characteristically dogmatic. :(


We differ there. For me, the "dominating factor" -- if anything must dominate -- is creating great content for the user.


How do you know so prescriptively "what it was meant for"?

Obviously it's meant to describe the document, but there's a lot of scope for interpretation within that. The document is, after all, part of the wider website; and that can be a relevant thing for someone to know.


Maybe, maybe not. I'm going to want keywords to come first, but I'm not convinced that the branding at the end does any harm.

I tend to end up ranking well for my keywords anyway (my show-off, but admittedly spurious example, is "high serve", where I rank #3 out of 150 million pages or so). And yet, contrary to your dogma, I have branding in my titles.

Of course, you can say that I would be doing better if I didn't have branding. But you can't prove that, and I can't disprove it. So ultimately, as with all dogma, we reach an impasse.

saltedm8

hehe, I guess at the end of the day, there are many ways to seo your site, and many ways that branding can be implemented

since you are getting a little weary, I wont argue to point but I have to say that in my own tests with this forum and other sites, I found that removing the 'branding' from the title is a good thing, I have tried lots of combinations, webprocafe | coffee & code; ( 100% branded ) webprocafe| web design forums; ( small branding ) and of course what we have now ( no branding ) .. just to name a few and the best results I have had so far are what we have now ( this has been the same for all my sites ) - I did what I have done under advice from 3 seo professional sources.

1 friend, 1 seo business and 1 seo forum...

it can be proved simply be including branding for 6 months and then removed for 6 months, then look at the different search engine position results.

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ljackson

its an interesting debate which i'd like to join in but unfortunatly i know sfa lol, but i get the jist of what your saying. :)

just out of curiosity how long does it take for google to re crawl a site, i have changed a few things and would like to see how it effects my search listing placement.

many thanks
Luke

saltedm8

to be sure, I would say give it 3 months for a certain change, obviously how fast the info is updated depends on how often you are crawled. and once the info is updated it can take quite a while for it to reflect in your search engine position.

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WelshStew

if you have google webmaster tools it will tell you when you were last crawled and the rate at which they crawl you.

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WelshStew
follow me on twitter here | WelshStew - Web Design & Web Development | Motorhome hire uk

ljackson

yeah i do have google webmaster tools, i will check that out thanks :)

ljackson

one other query guys, does it matter how many h1 tags i use on a page? should i use just the one or does it not matter how many i use?

thanks
Luke