Adding Emojis to Website Titles and Descriptions

Today, emojis are everywhere. People use them in everyday conversation and even professional brands are getting on board, trying to make emojis work for them in the content that they share and post. But how can you add emojis to your website titles and descriptions? Should you be using emojis? And most importantly, what do the search engines think about these unique little characters? Here’s what you need to know.

Emojis are universally recognized across a variety of platforms and devices. They can help your search engine results get noticed and increase clickthrough rates when you use them accordingly. Google has explicitly stated that using emojis won’t damage your SERP rankings (search engine results page), but whether it does any good is actually up for debate.

You can use emojis in your website titles and descriptions by using the HTML code for emojis rather than just using the emojis directly. Many platforms also include plugins, like the Yoast SEO plugin which is designed to help sites integrate the best content and check it for optimization.

Search for the Unicode or HTML entry for the emoji that you want to use. When creating a page manually, you can then add the character to your content with the shorthand code that is used to identify the image. You may have to get familiar with the different Unicode tags and numbers so that you know how to incorporate emojis and make sure that you get the right one each time.

But should I be using emojis?

Just because you can do some things doesn’t mean that you should. Such is the case with emojis—they may have a place in your content and they might attract more users with their unique visual appeal. However, you don’t have to use them and there is certainly a case for those who use them too often or in a way that is not helping rankings.

Should you be using emojis? Only you can decide if they’re an effective marketing tool for you or not. At least now you know that Google won’t ding you for using them, and that they may be something worth considering. And, if you choose to use them, you’ll need to find the codes to write them into your site accordingly. Don’t overdo it because it can impact your reputation, but don’t sell emojis short, either, because they’re helping some brands get noticed.