Should My Company Name Appear In My Meta Tags?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

A company can make its name a part of the meta tag, but I wouldn’t recommend it for most companies. That’s because people who don’t know about your company aren’t going to be looking for you by name. If you are a small business where most people searching for the services you provide will search by some other keyword then I’d say your company name in your meta tags are going to be pretty useless. On the other hand, if you are a popular company that would be searched for a lot by name then I would say most certainly you would want your name in the meta tags.

A great example would be the case of one of my favorite candies – M&M’s. You’ll notice by the SERP that the company’s website is not www.M&M.com as one might suspect. Rather, it is www.m-ms.com. But who would guess that?

If you don’t know that M&M’s company domain name is m hyphen m s then you’ll never find it unless you search by company name. The folks performing SEO services for M&M’s were smart. They included the company name in both the title tag and the description tag. Why else would they do it differently? It was the perfect solution.

Now a word on domain names. If possible, you want to use your most important keyword in your URL. You want to do this for two reasons. The first reason is it’s easier for people to remember www.chocolatecoveredpeanuts.com rather than www.bobslittlecandyshop.com. The other reason is for SEO purposes. It’s a competitive world online. You need every edge you can get. If you are running neck and neck in the searches with a competitor and one of you has your competing keyword in the URL while the other does not, all other things being equal, the business with the keyword in the URL is more likely to rank higher. There are thousands of variables at play, of course, but that one little technique could mean the difference between a page 1 ranking a page 2 ranking in some cases. You want to use every technique at your disposal to rank as highly as you can and that’s a small thing that you can do to push you up a little higher.

In M&M’s case, however, the & signal is not something you see in an URL too often. Special characters are typically used for specific purposes in URLs and not in the actual page indicators usually. The ampersand sign, particularly, is never used in the website or specific web page indicator part of the URL. That poses a problem for the M&M company. I would say they made the perfect rebound play by using their company name in both of the most important metas.