YBO Interactive Blog

I was asked by one of my customers to explain why removing the company name from all his pages titles is a good idea. It just didn’t make any sense.

As you can see in this list of Top Factors for Google Search Engine Ranking, the most important ranking factor on a web page is the <TITLE>.

A web page with the title “Johnny Depp’s Aquamarine Gemstones Shop” will rank significantly lower for the keyword aquamarine gemstones, then a web page with a title “Aquamarine Gemstones” assuming all the other ranking factors are the same. Google might get the impression that this page is also about “Johnny Depp”, “Johnny Depp’s shop” , a “Gemstones shop” or an “Aquamarine shop”. Keyword Focus is very important when optimizing titles. The less words you have around your keyword, the better. In most cases, your potential customers won’t search for your brand name, but more likely search for your product description. The ones that search for your brand name already know you, and know how to find you. Adding your brand name to the product description will be a total waste energy that won’t bring any good.

On any internal page it would be the best to have a title with the product description without a company name. Having said that, Home Pages are different.

I would put a company name on a Home Page <title> simply because a Home Page is not like any internal page on site, it has more importance than all the rest especially in terms of branding. In terms of look&feel, your company name simply belongs there. SEO is very important, but it is just another part in the marketing puzzle.

The first thing I would do when optimizing a new site is to remove the company name from all titles. It is not always easy to convince your customer that this is the right thing to do, but once they do it, it takes a very little time to show them that it works.

And it works great.

Warning: Search Engines like Google don’t ‘like’ big changes. Changing all titles of a site can cause damage. The advice that appears in this post is very good for new sites, or sites that have very little traffic and want to grow. If your site already has a lot of traffic, it is recommended to change the title of new pages (if it’s a blog, do it above a certain %postid%), and keep the old pages untouched. In any case, the best would be to consult an expert before doing big changes.

Tags: page titles, seo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 3:38 pm and is filed under google, seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.