Crafting Title Tags, Using - , | or : Options

[BeantownSEO]

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague of mine today. We were discussing title tags and we mentioned that when crafting title tags he preferred using the tab delimiter | in his title tags, so as a very generic example:

cars | new cars | nice cars

I mentioned that I have always used a mixture of - , | or : within my title tags depending on the structure of the actual sentence I was crafting as my title tag. So if it sounded better and made more grammatical sense I would use a -, or I would use :, depending on what I thought the situation called for. He replied back that I should stick to using only one so that there was an identifiable template and not a mixture. I agree that perhaps using a consistent template can be a good practice, but I don't feel it should be done at the expense of a solid reading and understandable title tag.

He also mentioned he believed that perhaps using a - could trip up the spiders when looking at title tags and I was thinking to myself that was the silliest thing I'd ever heard since when you do a search you will see many title tags using a -. This guy claims to know a lot about SEO and has his own business (though not purely an SEO company) and I've been in the game for about 2 years now and I just thought this was a bunch of rubbish.

Thoughts?

[1dmf]

well as far as I am aware the SE's see hyphens as word seperators, and I'd very much doubt the hyphen in a title tage would trip them up, what about hyphendated words? , or domains with hyphens in them?

Nah , pesonally i'd agree with you, but hey what do I know (IMG:style_emoticons/default/giggle.gif)

oh BTW, i use pipes '|' ( as a programmer I know them as a PIPE character not TAB)

Why, because I see it used more than anything else, so followed like the sheep i am, (yes Jill/Randy/Torks I know the black one!), anyhow!

I see them as stoppers, to break up the title into the keyphrases i'm targeting ,

keyphrase1 | keyphrase2 | keyphrase3

So would be interested in hearing from the experts their take on the right title tag dilemiter to use (IMG:style_emoticons/default/searchme.gif)

This post has been edited by 1dmf: Aug 15 2008, 01:27 PM

[Randy]

The choice is a non-issue for SEO purposes. Makes no difference which you choose.

Use whichever you prefer and which will be best for real users.

[Jill]

Beantown, you are absolutely 100% correct and the person you were talking to is wrong, wrong, wrong. (IMO)

[torka]

I often use » (a right angle quote, in case it doesn't display correctly for you). I use it because I like the way it looks. Haven't noticed any issues with the SEs (or anybody else, for that matter).

If those things don't trip up the SE's, I'd say there's almost no chance a simple hyphen or colon (or even a pipe) would do.

My (IMG:style_emoticons/default/penny.gif)

--Torka (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[DannySantos]

I agree with torka, if I'm using anything it will be the guillemet (») which in HTML you would write:

CODE

»

However, I'm not too keen on using that structure for the title tag. Its not what the real user wants to see, and the title tag will be the link back to your site from the SERP's.

At the end of the day, theres no point having a site with great PageRank (I'm referring of course to the REAL PageRank, not that little pointless green bar) if nobody feels inclined to click on your link

[lisaw]

Thanks for clarification - looking forward to getting to know everyone here. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Julien]

Hi Danny,

I see Chris' posts on Webmater talk brought you here as well?
Am I right? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/thinking.gif)

[BeantownSEO]

Thanks guys - yeah I knew better and when I was listening was just like what is this guy talking about but i'm glad to see my instincts were correct on this one........it just seems logical that you would want your title tag to sound as perfect as possible (not discussing the obvious use of keywords or anything like that in this thread) and that the use of any of those punctuations would be appropriate at the appropriate time.

Personally i'm not a big fan of the delimiter title tags such as cars | model cars | classic cars....just looks a little stale to me; I liek the title tag that speaks to what the page is about, using the targeted keywords, in a readbale manner.

[Sarah]

The QA guy in our office has made it very clear to us that for reason of accessibility, we must never use the "|"

Anyone who is visually impaired and using a screen reader will hear "keyword 1 bar keyword 2 bar keyword 3" which is not very user friendly. For this reason alone, we use colons when we have to and try to make "mini sentences" for our page titles (as in very small mini sentences) as much as possible.

[Orpheus Descendi...]

Anyone who is visually impaired and using a screen reader will hear "keyword 1 bar keyword 2 bar keyword 3"

Hi Sarah, thanks for that valuable piece of info.

[BeantownSEO]

Very interesting Sarah, thanks for sharing. I'm going to assume that using the - would be acceptable for screen readers as well then?

[MaKa]

This discussion made me curious, so I tried downloading a freeware screen reader. To answer your question it uses - , : for intonations/short pause. It read out | as vertical line.

I would recommend trying it yourself!

[Shannon Lilly]

I would be interested to know what Jill or Randy has to say about the » in the title tag. IMO it looks way better then Pipes or Hyphens.

So how about it?

[Jill]

Never tried it. Just try it for yourself and see. Your tests should be as good as anyone else's.