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.
Using a hyphen in title tags and the impact of spaces
-
Hi
I am trying to arrive at a best practice template for a title tag for my organization so does the following template still holds
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
will anything be impacted if I eliminate the spaces between the hyphen, will search bots be still able to treat the first one as a priority and the second as the secondary?
Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
thank you
-
Thank you
-
Providing you've got a separator (like a hyphen) it shouldn't make any difference. I will be more concerned about the grammar and how it looks to the searcher.
If it was me and I was using it to separate two different phrases I would make sure it had spaces either side. However, if it's a hyphenated word it wouldn't make sense to use spaces.
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
-
Value of using spaces or no spaces on product category page varient keywords
Hello, all fellow Mozzers,
On-Page Optimization | | JamesDavison
I have taken over a project and this account, so can't change the username according to MOZ.🙃 We run an eCommerce website, and to me, some of the content is conflicting as some pages have more information content than what I would put in a commerce page, but this is how the boss wants it to work, personally, I would separate the content out.
The page I'm working on:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/205-70-14.html
and this is an example of the rest of these types of pages, I will be tackling:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/125-15.html I was tasked to improve SEO ranking, when using the MOZ page grader I had a score of 24 out of 27 83% SEO score and 3-page problems. 7th position in Google for the search term 205/70 R14 As it is a generic product listing page, It was pointless to add to the URL and the Internal links I can't reduce as these are links to products, so I went to reduce the
keyword stuffing and making the page content more natural, this improved the page to 25 out of 27, 87% SEO score and 2-page problems. Improvement to 3rd position in Google, but he wants to chase 1st place to be above his competitors, which is fair enough. It turns out that in the past, they have used this type of page to try and get a high ranking for several search terms, as it is a different variation on a tyre size terms are:
205/70 R14, 205/70R14, 205/70 R 14
205/70 X 14, 205/70X14, 205/70 X14
and so on for all the different ways you can search for this tyre size. He is also convinced Google will see these as different search terms, and while I agree to an extent, this causes Keyword Stuffing on the page, which in turn was harming the rankings. Each product listed on the page already has its own title 205/70 R14, 205/70 HR14 and so on, so my question is. What is the best practice for writing content on these types of pages to gain high rankings for several Keywords, and what value does writing the same keyword with spaces and no spaces have? Any help or advice is welcome, so I have a better understanding of how to approach this for this page and the rest of the site. Cheers Mal0 -
Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.
We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
How to separate your - keywords - and | Brand name in the Title Tag
I have traditionally used hyphens (-) and vertical bars (|) to separate out keywords/brands in title tags. A client has asked if other characters will work such as tilde (~), apersat (@), forward slash (/) etc. Are there any special characters we should steer clear of?
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Punctuation at the Start of Page Titles
one of my clients appears to be using an exclamation mark (e.g. "! Graphic Prints By Mirrorin - Fun Childrens Graphic Prints") and to be completely honest, I have no idea if this is bad practice or if it wont have any affect from an SEO point of view? Any help would be appreciated because it is site wide, therefore if it is an issue I would like to be able to get it sorted asap! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Trying to SEO a site that used Header Tags for Design
I am trying to SEO a website that was built years ago and uses Header tags for design. The site must have 25 and tags used for design purpose. Is there any way to work around this problem? Perhaps a code that tells Google to ignore these as Headers? The web designers say that they are looking to fix the problem sometime this summer but you never know if that means it a month away or years away. I really want to help this website but I believe that the Header tags are one of the reasons that his site does not show in the top 100 rankings for any keywords. Any help would be great. www.wallybuysell.com Chris.K
On-Page Optimization | | CKerr0 -
Are H1 tags important or influential?
We are in the process of correcting our site in hopes that Google will rank us higher in the SERP. We have many pages that have multiple H1 tags or no H1 tag at all. How important is the H1 tag? Will it help us increase our ranking on Google? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Title Tags: Does having the singular and plural version of the keyword hurt the ranking?
I'm wondering if there is a duplication issue with having a singular AND plural version of a keyword in the Title Tag. For example: Wood Desk - Wood Desks| Furniture Store Would this help or hurt my ranking for this URL? I can’t find a concrete answer for this under Moz’s “Title Tag SEO Best Practices Page.” Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | jampaper0 -
Post Title - Use the blog's name or not?
In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.
On-Page Optimization | | gregalam0
