Do we need the | Sitename.com portion for SEO?

Hi MDC2957,

I’m not sure if “Sitename.com” is a title, but if your brand name contains “.com” then that’s OK :).

According to Google, you should brand your title. More information on the options are provided in the next update, but here’s what it will link to:

Brand your titles, but concisely. The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site—for instance, “ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle.” But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this:
<title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>

“a place for people to meet and mingle.” is the homepage tagline. “ExampleSocialSite” is the brand.
“,” and “:” are separators.
“Sign up for a new account.” is a descriptive page title.

They continue:

If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources.

So if for example it’s too long, duplicated, or stuffed with keywords, then Google can rewrite your title; which could be helpful, or not. All you know is that it’s not what you intended to put out there :).

This is why guidelines are set, with a title length limit of at most ~70 characters, while containing your brand and a separator.

I hope this clears things up!

Somewhat but not really. In other words, here’s an example

This is the title of the article | Sitename.com

If I have so many articles, then isn’t it just redundant to have the sitename.com after it? It doesn’t seem like it helps anything right? All it does it make the title too long.

I understand the confusion MDC2957.

The issue is that Google looks at every page as a “new” one, and it wants to know where it belongs to, just like your returning visitors do.
If your brand is known, people can trust it and will click on it rather than another.
If, for instance, I find a document on Reddit, I can see in an instance it’s on Reddit.

For example, like in this Google search query, you’ll see titles being truncated.
However, the brand name “Reddit”/”AskReddit” will always be present.
Most titles you’ll find on that page are limited to 55 to 65 characters (upper limit), and have been upped by the brand to contain 12 more “... - Reddit“.

Allowing even for 77 characters!

This shows that you can even have longer titles with your brand name, than without.
I see that Google’s making some (experimental) changes on this matter, I’ll conduct more research :). But from what I can see, in that example Search Query alone, Google allows for more than 55 characters to be used when including a brand name.

Please note that sites with enormous authority and presence can sometimes be highlighted differently in Google. Which is something to take into account.

The best thing you can do is testing out what works for you! Search Engines are quite “secretive” about what works, and what doesn’t.
Ultimately it’s your decision and you should do where you feel most comfortable with.

I hope this helps! It’s a lot to take in, even for me at the moment as I’m already working on the next release :). Let me know if anything’s unclear.

What you said makes a lot of sense and I do understand now. It’s a little frustrating because I was using Yoast before and now all my titles and descriptions are showing red, as too long so I’m going back and changing them so they meet the criteria for green

Hi MDC2957,

Please, don’t do that, yet. Changing a title can render a page anew and can even harm your rankings. Let’s do a bit of research beforehand :).

How much too long are the titles and pages?
And if you “Google” for a page that has a title too long, are the results somewhat OK in Google?
And are the titles changed a lot after you switched?
Also, can you find the option to disable title additions in the SEO Settings?

The bar is merely a guideline, a helpful guideline, but still a guideline.

No rankings to mess up. I’m changing my site from old joomla to wordpress. So nothing has been indexed yet on the new site. I will have 301 redirects to all the new wordpress pages. There was a big thread going in one of the facebook groups about your plugin. They said yours is better and faster than Yoast. However, I’m curious about something. With Yoast, there were guidelines about targeting keywords in posts, and they would tell you things about using certain header tags, etc. I noticed that your plugin only advises on the custom title and description. Do we not need to worry about being very particular about the content of the post itself, whether it be just a blog post, or a woocommerce product?

Then it’s good you have a playground to work with :).

Those guidelines are called “Keyword Analysis”, which has been discussed thoroughly right here.

In that topic, I referred back to a related “SEO Tip of the Update”, which is, and describes a bit of Keyword Analysis:

The Title tag is considered the most important part for SEO. It’s what binds the whole site together. That’s why this plugin outputs the blog name on every page [by default].
Having a well-constructed Title consists of the Blog Name and an addition. This addition should describe the whole page in a few words.
Referring back to the Title within the first or last paragraph, or within a subheader as well as in the Description will improve your chances to be found for those words.
Alternatively, a question as the title where you give an answer in the first paragraph is considered rich content. It might even put your page in the rich content results on Google.

In this reply on another topic I explain why keyword analysis is a very difficult thing to do, when you want to do it right.

I highlight:

The issue is that the named system doesn’t work anymore, since synonyms are considered, and I’ve finally found an example:

architects, architect, architectural, architecture, architect office, architectural firm

These are all somewhat the same word according to Google in one form or the other.
Using each of these words in your title might be considered as spam, even though they differ.
If you were to try to fit all (and multilingual) synonyms that Google considers (without letting us know what they are!) into a plugin then you’ve got yourself a few gigabytes of data crunching, on every word you type :). There has to be a better way.

Keyword Analysis is very important, but a sticking visitor is much more important.
Write good, intriguing content. Make a beautiful themed website and care about understandable navigation.
That will, in combination with social activity, help your website rank very well!

And of course, here are more than 200 ranking factors.

I hope this helps! ??

It does help,, such a complicated topic though. I’ll just do the best that I can and hope I do better in the search engines with a responsive site and changing to wordpress, along with your plugin.

Going responsive is on its own a huge positive change!

Good luck and don’t overdo on plugins :). A speedy website is also a great ranking factor.

Prior to google’s recent algorithm updates, we were ranked on the first page of google for a long time.. but the joomla 1.5 is now old, outdated and penalized so we’re moving to wordpress. It’s such an undertaking, I just want it to be finished. I have quite a few plugins unfortunately, some you just can’t get around using when you have an ecommerce site. But I think it will be okay in the end.

I understand! I did a server move two weeks ago, it has taken a toll on me with the amount of work it required.

If you feel that your website’s becoming too slow, there’s a cure-all available.

Have a great day! All the best :).

I’m using WPEngine hosting, and they have their own caching thing set up which is supposed to be good, so we’ll see in due time. Thank you again.