The use of (&) or (And) in my titles

[seorocks]

Hi All,

hope all is well

could someone please help me with this SEO related decison?

do people use the word (and) more? or the (&) more?

also, i noticed when searching in google for example:

- London and Hotels
- London & Hotels

I had two completely different information displayed.

any ideas?

thanks a lot

T

[inertia]

Stick with whats getting typed in the most. Most people type "and" instead of"&".

If youre unsure try checking the results for each on something like Wordtracker.

Are you using Wordtracker or Keyword Universe to research your keywords because i found some keywords that (in my opinion) would be better?

[Dubbya]

"And" as well as "&" are "stop words" and are not indexed my most, if not all SE's anyway, so it really doesn't matter.

Considering that the ampersand is especially common in query strings, you can understand why it's not given any weight in terms of relevance.

For example, look at the following URL:

http://www.widgets.com/find-widgets.asp?id=0012345&color=blue&item=widget&size=large

In the above example, you can see that stripping out the ampersands and replacing them with spaces, which is what the SE's do, would make this page somewhat relevant for the search phrase "0012345 large blue widget".

Assuming that you can apply this premise to your titles, links and content, you be much better off to just optimize for "London Hotels" since most people would use that as the basis for their search anyway.

.02

[erikko]

sometimes ampersand sign isn't the choice to type "and" so take the word itself

[Dubbya]

Again, "AND" is a stop word. It gets stripped out and replaced with a space.

Use it or don't, your choice. Just as long as the sentence is readable.

[tamecrow]

Google knows they're the same thing. In title tags, I'd use the ampersand in order to keep the character count down.

[inertia]

But, just coz G knows they are the same doesnt it still treat them differently?

For example if you take 2 pages, one optimised for "bed & breakfast" and one for "bed and breakfast". The "bed & breakfast" page will appear higher when you use the ampersand and vice versa?

[seorocks]

so from a user prospective it is recommended to go with the (and)
but for meta title length its recommended to go with (&)

[WDC]

so from a user prospective it is recommended to go with the (and)
but for meta title length its recommended to go with (&)

Better target only one keyword either with & or AND

[mjtaylor]

so from a user prospective it is recommended to go with the (and)
but for meta title length its recommended to go with (&)

That would depend - in the case of a Bed & Breakfast, I would say most searchers will use the ampersand.