Which symbol should I use in the title: "|" or "-"?

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Solution 1

It makes no difference to SEO. Just remember to put your keyword at the beginning of the title and the branding at the end. Search engines always place more importance at the beginning of a text block and you should always rank for your branded terms. Check out this resource of best practice for writing meta titles:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

Solution 2

I would say that "-" is better for users. The minus/dash is a "regular" character they are more likely to have come across and know the location of the key.

Stack Exchange uses the "-" to separate the prepended tags from the actual title. This question is:

seo - Which symbol should I use in Meta Title: “|” or “-”? - Stack Exchange.

The Guardian uses "|" to separate the title from the name of the paper:

Latest news, sport and comment from the Guardian | The Guardian

Given that both sites rely on SEO it clearly doesn't matter which you use.

Solution 3

I would suggest you run searches for keywords related to your market see what others are doing. You'll most likely see a mix of "-" "|" and commas. Running a few competitive searches you'll see sites using all of the above so it doesn't matter to much as long as you don't stuff it with keywords, maybe throw in a long tail and keep it under 70 characters

Solution 4

Trust in most cases the separators in the title tags are used to distinct two separate names or titles (Organisation/Website/... FROM Subject/Title/Content/Example...). For this I trust the ':' symbol is also good option. Think this way have more natural look and reading.

Somebody: Something ...

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

  • user1052004
    user1052004 over 1 year

    So there are two way of writing a site's page title:

    Meow | Photo Magazine
    

    or:

    Meow - Photo Magazine
    

    Which one is better (for SEO and for users)?

  • lulalala
    lulalala almost 12 years
    +1 for easier to recognize, pipe | is a bit similar to I (in Ariel)
  • Alan Plum
    Alan Plum over 9 years
    Note that the article says to use a pipe ("|") to separate the brand but the site itself has moved on to just using dashes ("-") everywhere.