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>.

Now, take a look at the keyword “aquamarine gemstones“.

For this keyword, a web page with title “Johnny Depp’s Aquamarine Gemstones Shop” will rank significantly lower then a web page with a title “Aquamarine Gemstones” assuming all the other ranking factors are the same. Had we used the first title, Google might have understood that our site is also about “Johnny Depp”, “Johnny Depp’s shop” , a “Gemstones shop” and maybe also an “Aquamarine shop”. Focus on keywords is very important when optimizing titles.

When working with commercial websites the assumption is that our potential customers are not searching for the brand name, but more likely searching for the product description, therefore a title with a product description is better.
For that reason, on any internal page I would prefer to have a title with the product description without a company name.

And yet, I would still use the company name on a Home Page 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. The internal pages are there for the content. They can do without it.

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. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.