Google seems to use the Title tag as the primary source for determining sitelink titles.  However, I noticed that for some sites, the page title is not the same as the sitelink title.  For example, Airbnb has a sitelink titled 'Business Travel':    But when you enter the page the title is actually 'Corporate &amp; Business Travel on Airbnb':    Does anyone know how to determine the title of a sitelink, and make it different than the target page's title?  Thanks!  *Note: The precise process of determining the sitelink title is automated, and Google is not transparent about it at the moment.
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I'm just wondering how it is possible that IGN.com has this in its title tag:      Video Games, Cheats, Walkthroughs, Game Trailers, Reviews, News, Previews &amp; Videos at IGN   while on Google its title is simply "IGN".   How can one achieve such a thing? Does it use some special meta tag I can't see?
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I have a number of DIV's that break up a page into logical elements for styles and positioning, etc.  As part of optimizing my site for search engine spiders, should I include a title attribute within these DIV's?  (Yes I have a title as part of the whole page, I'm curious on individual structual elements)  Ex  ... &lt;div id="SearchOptions" title="Search filters and options - Type in a name or pick a business and Click 'Search' to get started" &gt;   .... &lt;/div&gt; ...
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Are there any best practices for choosing the title of web pages? There are a lot of resources online oriented toward SEO, but not toward users.  My impression is that most sites have something similar to Product - Page. But there are cases when switching this around is more useful. For example, if mail clients displayed the title like this:  Inbox (3) - Gmail  Instead of:  Gmail - Inbox (3)  You would be able to see the message count, even if the title was cut off. (I'm pretty sure Gmail used to do this).  I assume the title is mostly ignored by users except when:   using boorkmarks finding the right tab in the browser   What are the considerations for users when choosing a web page title? Are there different considerations for the home page, pages behind a login, etc?
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I want to know, is there a huge difference in terms of SEO between these URLs:  example.com/ontario/toronto/listings   or  example.com/listings.php?p=ontario&amp;c=toronto   Will one URL rank higher than the other? Is there a huge difference here?
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Lets say my website looks like this:  News -Hello world -Foo -Bar  So the parent page will list the last 3 news messages. For each news message there is a sub-page. For the parent page I was thinking of setting the page title to: News - Hello world, Foo, Bar.  Now if somebody adds a new message the title tag will also change. I googled this and read a few blog posts where people said that changing the title actually hurts the ranking of that page.  So is this true? Should I just set a static title tag for all my pages?
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We're a web design company that have created several websites for clients, all of which have a back link to our own website. I was just wondering the best strategy for this:   Should the keywords be in the title, alt and link text? E.g &lt;a href="domain.com" title="keyword"&gt;Keyword&lt;/a&gt;? Should we make the keyword the same on all the client web sites? Should we incorporate our company name as the link text?   Are there any other general things I should follow?  UPDATE: Currently we have "designed &amp; built by ". Are we better off having something like ""?
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I have a webpage that implements a set of tabs each showing different content. The tab clicks do not refresh the page but hide/unhide contents at the client side.  Now there is a requirement to change the page title according to the tab selected on the page ( for SEO reasons ). Is this possible? Can someone suggest a solution to dynamically alter the page title via javascript without reloading the page?
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I have a client with a dozen territorial domains, like mydomain.co.uk, mydomain.fr, mydomain.de, etc Most of these domains hold a different language of the same dynamic content (shop), but some, like co.uk and .com, have the same language and content, except for some content customized to each country/domain in the front page, contact and other pages.  I am aware that we should use the canonical meta tag to mark those duplicated contents, but, we want the co.uk to be present in UK ( indexed in google.co.uk ) and the .com to be present in US and other countries, for example, or least that is the goal.  Is there anything we can do to "help" google determine the geographical meaning of each domain? If we mark with canonical tag the .com and co.uk sites, do you know how google will decide which one to show on a given search?
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I am working on an ecommerce site, I told our SEO consultant that I plan to make the URL scheme: /products/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;name&gt;. This is similar to Stackoverflow's URLs which are /questions/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;title&gt;.  He asked me if I could change the URL scheme to /p/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;name&gt; instead. I know why he wants this change, the word "products" isn't needed to find the correct product, and it doesn't offer any SEO, so shortening it to just p would make the relevant keywords in the &lt;name&gt; weigh more.  His main priority is maximizing SEO, but the part that I don't think he is considering is how this effects the semantics of the site. Also having the word "products" looks like it has meaning and a reason for being there, just having a p looks chaotic and ugly to me. I also don't think it makes that much of a difference does it? Stackoverflow doesn't use /q/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;title&gt; and they do just fine, I do realize that theres many factors at play here though, not just the URL.  So I want some outside opinions on which is the better way and why?
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A coworker and I are locked in a debate over the value of SEO keywords in the URL of a page. She wants to change all the filenames of the HTML pages of a fencing company so they look like residential-home-chicago.html, contact-chicago-contractor.html, and so on. She is convinced that because Google highlights keywords in URLs in search results, that means that putting keywords here is more valuable.  My position is that these do not improve SEO, since Google doesn't seem to give keywords in the URL any more weight than keywords in the body of the page, and . In the meantime, they make it harder for me to find the pages I want when its time to edit them, and the site as a whole looks cheap and spammy.   suggests to me that yes, keywords in URLs are useful, but not superior, and that they are more useful for human readability than search engine rankings.  I'm looking for authoritative sources that support either position, not blog articles from SEO optimization companies trying to promote themselves.
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I am confused about hreflang="x-default".  I have a site in 2 languages. In each page I have a link to the page itself and a link to the same page in the other language. If I understand correctly, I have to put an x-default also. In my case it goes to the page "language". There the user can see two buttons to choose the language of the site.  The x-default link is the same on all pages and it is present in all of them.   &lt;link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://example.com/about" /&gt;  &lt;link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://example.com/fr/about" /&gt; &lt;link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://example.com/language" /&gt;   I use Screaming Frog to detect possible errors. It says "Missing confirmation links in all the pages" when I see the details of the error. It makes reference only to the x-default link. I do not understand.  How to use the hreflang="x-default"?
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For my website, I am using a static home page page Home (template front-page.php) and for posts- page News (template home.php)  I need to show all the post titles and exceprts on that page News (templ. home.php), but also show the original title and the_content from that page News itself.  This code below while statement shows all the posts, which is good, but the top the_title also shows the title from the first post, not from the News page itself.  How to achieve what I need?  &lt;?php get_header(); ?&gt;      &lt;?php     the_title();           the_content();     ?&gt;  &lt;?php if(have_posts()) while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?&gt;          &lt;?php         the_title();         ?&gt;          &lt;?php         the_content();         ?&gt;      &lt;?php     endwhile;     ?&gt;    &lt;?php get_footer(); ?&gt;
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My website changed significantly this month.  Amongst the changes was the website's title.  Two weeks ago, I finally used Webmaster Tools and submitted the page.  So far, Yahoo and Bing have updated the title in the search results, but not Google.  I've resubmitted via Webmaster Tools the website, and the bots have crawled the page, and have added "content keywords".  But the title still doesn't match.  The "content keywords" lists many of the words in the new title (but contains keywords of the existing title also).  Must say that 4 of the top 5 key words in the "significance" list are the new title's.  Still, no change.  Any remedies for this problem?  Is adding the "alt" tag for the logo significant enough to trigger the change?  There isn't an appropriate place to put the company name between  tags on the front page.  Any suggestions?  Thanks.
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When I perform a search, the result entries display the relevant tags, but only if it is a question link. If it's an answer link, there are no tags displayed. Sometimes I can easily infer the language, platform or technology, by reading the title and the excerpt -- but sometimes not, requiring me a visit to the question page. I suggest that when answers are displayed as search result entries, these entries include the tags of the parent question.
18062
If you start the title of a question with a construction like "[tag]", you get a red box telling you that:     Title contains a [tag] prefix; please use the tag field to enter tags instead.     And so, I can't title this post "[tag] prohibition in titles on meta sites is inappropriate". A travesty!  This blocking dialog is certainly appropriate on all main sites, but is not appropriate on meta sites (child and Meta.SE alike), where "[tag]" may legitimately be used at the beginning of a post title to refer to the main-site tag "[tag]". Enclosing tag names in square brackets is a somewhat-established convention (I guess because that's how you search for them), which is why I tried to do that.   Yes, I know I can work around this by rephrasing my title so that the tag name is not at the beginning of the title, or by not enclosing the tag name in brackets. Still should be changed, in my opinion.
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I am working on a website for a client, and even though the site ranks extremely well for various different keywords (which is good), if I search for the site's name the homepage does not appear even on the second page on Google. I have to add the .com so it will appear.  But, for big brands like Best Buy, Nike and millions of others it is enough to just search for the brand itself and the first or second suggestion on Google is the brand's homepage.  How can I raise my brand's authority in Google so it will appear in Google on the first page when some searches for it?  I have tried changing the breadcrumbs so instead of "HOME" it is now the brandname, linked to the homepage. I thought that it will help with internal linking if the anchor text is the brand's name instead of the word "HOME".  Any ideas please?
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It often happens that people will refer to other questions by simply pasting the full link to this question, especially on Meta.  Would it be a good idea to detect such links, and replace them directly by a formatted link on their current title?  Example:    You can try formatting at this  question:  https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49424/stack-exchange-sandbox   Would be automatically changed in:      You can try formatting at this   question:    It would make links given by new users (unaware of the full syntax) more elegant, and it would also be faster when more regular (and lazy) users want to point to another question without making the usual "see it "    Edit: Note that this behaviour is implemented already for the "possible duplicate" auto comments, so the question here is not about "how to do this technically".