SEO stymied by symbols?
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Hi there,
My blog has a very strong food review aspect, with a focus on burgers. I live in a relatively small city, with a unique name (Hobart), where my blog is probably one of the most widely read when it comes to burger blogging.
In burger blog titles I use the format:
“Burger Challenge @ <insert venue> – Hobart, Tasmania”
Having done a little bit of research into SEO it is my belief that this should return strong results for typical searches regarding burgers in my home town.
However, when I do a Google search it seems that my first blog results may only appear five pages deep in the search results and I can’t work out why.
For example, a search for the following string
“The Standard” Hobart Tasmania
only brings up my blog on the fifth page. The title for this blog page is “Burger Challenge @ The Standard – Hobart, Tasmania”, so I thought it would at least pop up on, or close to, the first results page…?
Can anyone see if I’m doing anything incorrectly with my SEO, or is the ‘@’ symbol perhaps playing havoc?
Any assistance is appreciated!
Regards,
Andrew.The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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You have this ass backwards. Who fed you this rubbish about SEO? Never ever insert any special character, let alone one that’s meant for email addresses only, into any place where an email address is not being provided. The appropriate practice for good SEO is to be with the program and that doesn’t mean idiotic gameplaying. It means ditching the cutesy crappola that people are using these days that dumps their posts to the end of the SERPs. See here > http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2013/07/21/avoid-special-character-use-in-titles-and-tags/
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Are you also putting captions & using Alt text that has a description of the town or food outlet?
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Maybe I was not clear enough above. If you insert special characters where they do not belong the search spiders send it to supplemental results, because that behavior is associated with spammers, scammers and SEO gameplayers.You never ever want to get such a reputation so don’t be cute, learn the correct ways of white hat on page optimization and do not deviate from them.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a -
6 Ways to Make Google Your Blog’s Best Friend http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2012/10/08/6-ways-to-make-google-your-blogs-best-friend/
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Some fantastic information there, and I am very grateful!
I did try to find out at the time whether the use of the ‘@’ symbol would cause problems but was unable to find any literature on that subject. I wish I’d found the link that you provided months ago!!
Time to go back and redo all my titles…
Much appreciated.
Andrew.
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Hi Gain Andrew,
I’m the same blogger but I am now logged in under my other username. I’m happy to know what I posted helped you. Best wishes with your site. -
Hi Andrew.
If you are looking to use a symbol to separate the phrases in your <Title> I would use the ‘pipe’ symbol like this ==> |
For instance: Burger Challenge | <insert venue> | Hobart, Tasmania
Hope this helps…
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