Title Tag: Company Name Or No?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 23 of January , 2008 at 8:09 am

I’ve read in several places that the best SEO advice for putting your company name in the title tag is not a good idea. I’ll have to agree. This is just sound, solid wisdom.

If you look at the top of your browser, in the blue bar at the very top, you’ll see the title tag of the page you are looking at. Sometimes, many times in fact, you’ll see a word or phrase followed by a hyphen and another word or phrase. That first word or phrase, before the hyphen, should be a keyword-rich phrase that you want that page to rank for. Most people are not going to search for your company name, unless you are a big branded company that is well known, like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. In that case, you might want your company name first, but otherwise not.

If you absolutely must put your company name in the title tag, put it at the end, after the hyphen. You might still rank for that name, but what you really want to do is rank for the keywords associated with your company name. That’s branding through your title tag. It works and you might as well just stick to conventional wisdom.

Category: Branding, Meta Tags, SEO

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