Page Title in Local SEO Title Tags?

[kbaltzell]

Hi All,

Still working on my title tag usage for local SEO, and I was hoping for some more feedback.

My question is this:

In Local SEO titles, I'm using location + keyword combinations, unique on each page. However, since each page has a specific title for the client, I figure I should be placing that at the front. My thought here was that this helps with the overall usability to the reader of the website.

Ex. Contact Us page for Pizza shop

Contact Us | Springfield IN Gourmet Pizza | Moe's Italian Pizza

Anyone have thoughts on this one?

Thank you!

[SEO5Team]

Hi Tyler,

My thoughts would be to go with the keyword+location. Also the keyword or location should not be mentioned more than 2 times in the title tag.

Some other links below addressing the same topic:

Local SEO

Best Practices

[kbaltzell]

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I've actually read a bit of Linda's posting so I really should have checked there also!  Still trying to get a hang of all of this, and wading through conflicting information can sometimes make things difficult.

So you are thinking I shouldn't include the title of the page itself within the title tag?

[SEO5Team]

the title of the page is ok to include as it does benefit the visitor when they are looking through the search results in Google. However you can shorten it. (Contact, instead of Contact Us, About Instead of About Us)

[kbaltzell]

Perfect! Thank you so much for your input. Trying my best to ensure that I'm learning inline with best practices

Help much appreciated!

[SEO5Team]

You're most welcome. all the best  

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Tyler,

That's great that you're aware of Linda's forum (I'm a mod there, too:))!  I recommend writing your title tags in a more natural manner than the example you've given above. I'd go with something more like that:

Contact Moe's Italian Pizza In Springfield, IN At (XXX) XXX-XXXX

If you've found that 'gourmet' is a vital keyword for the page, you could work that in instead of the phone number, but I always try to put the phone number in the title tag of the contact page. See how my example reads naturally? Like a human would speak? In my opinion, this is the optimum way to go. Rand agrees with this method, too. I recommend you watch his WhiteBoard Friday from earlier in the year in which he talks about naturalness in title tags:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

Also, be careful about repeating keywords, as covered in Linda's thread which SEO5 has smartly linked to.

Hope this helps!