Website code can seem mystifying if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Today we answer a question from one of our longtime clients who wanted to know more about title tags, and when to use his company name in those title tags. Our client received an email from someone attempting to get business from non-web-savvy people, so he wanted to check with us to get the real scoop.
Question: Some people say that the name of my company should only appear in the title tags for the Homepage, About Us, and Contact Us pages. However, my website features my company’s name in the title tags on all of my pages. Am I wrong? Should I remove my company name from most of my website’s pages?
Answer: Having the firm name in the title tags gives your site ownership of those pages, and also adds those keywords to the searches. The suggestion of removing your company’s name from the title can only hurt you as it disassociates your company with the pages from within the title. For every person that says company names should be removed, I can show you other people who say it should definitely be in there.
As we mentioned above, we recommend putting your company’s name at the end of your title tag. If you use a unique page title that accurately sums up the topic of the page, putting it at the beginning of the title tag will mean that it is more important than the company name. That is what you want. This strategy allows you to take advantage of the terms within your company name.
You can read more about the title tag here. The advice from Moz.com is that the optimal formatting is “Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name”, with a secondary option of “Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword”. Since Google only looks at the first 70 characters of a title tag, the first option is going to work in your favor more so than the second option.
Another option is to get rid of your company name and use those 70 characters to fit as much description as possible into your title tag. Keep in mind, if your company name contains relevant terms, people may be searching for those terms without knowing the name of your company. So all in all, we recommend keeping the company name in the title tags, albeit at the end.