"And" vs "&"

[lwilkins]

I blog for hotels and I am wondering whether it is best to have on a wordpress tagline the name of the hotel such as Holiday Inn and Suites vs Holiday Inn & Suites. In Google AdWords, the "and" keyword always beats out the "&" word in exact search. The "&" just always looks cleaner. Also, when I refer to the hotel within a blog post, should I use the "and" or "&" in the name? Please help me understand which is best for seo.

Thank you!

[NewGlobalVentures.comSEOTexas]

Great question, but Ryan and de4e pretty much covered it.

Also keep in mind that the ampersand symbol can also be interpreted as & and that may hurt you. It may be that focusing JUST on Holiday Inn versus the others will no doubt provide the best return.

Always remember that you are writing to the general public and most of them or us tend to use short layman terms so that renders the "and Suites" somewhat obsolete.

Cheers!

[RyanKent]

Unless your client specifically requests (or rather demands) to be referred to by their complete name I would suggest simply using "Holiday Inn". Google's KeyWord tool shows the following traffic for the terms:

Holiday Inn and Suites - 1900 searches/month

Holiday Inn & Suites - 590 searches/month

Holiday Inn - 1 million searches/month

By adding "and Suites" or "& Suites" you are diluting your main focus "Holiday Inn". Literally 99.9% of your traffic is from "Holiday Inn". I would highly recommend dropping the rest. If you have to include it, I would use the text "and" version. Not only does it have more exact matches but when converting the text to a URL software will often replace the & symbol with the letter "a". Holiday Inn & Suites becomes /holiday-inn-a-suites which is less desirable.

[de4e]

There are both stop words, and most SE's ignore them. they apply in SERP only if you search exactly "and".

So (Holiday Inn and Suites)=(Holiday Inn & Suites) , but if they search ("Holiday Inn and Suites ")  he find only page with exactly phrase.