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I run a greeting cards website. With respect to the individual title tages, I was wondering if I should run the name of the greeting card first followed by my websites name, or vice-versa?
Thanks for any input, thoughts, and comments!
I look at titles as the best advertisment you can put in a few words to display in the search engines and bookmarks/favorites, etc. If a person is looking for a specific thing, let your title tell them it can be found through this link, your company name does not do that and would not get clicked.
* web surfers need their hand held at all times, never forget that. always tell them what to do and where to find it. they never will unless you help them along.
A title tag is very important and often is displayed in the indices of search engines.
It is the first opportunity you may have to get your sales pitch across.
If your company name is well known and you consider it to be a selling point then add it in. Personally I wouldn't start with it.
If you think people will search for your company name, again add it in.
It makes more sense to use your keywords to the best you can and if you want to weave in your name, do so.
As far as giving it any real benefit, maybe not.
he is talking about page 'headlines', not the <title> tag of a document. Though, as he mentioned, beginning a heading with your company name being good for search engine visibility is absolute garbage, unless he meant that 1 page of your site, like the 'about us' page, that you want to rank for your company name.
If any company just wants to rank for their own name, then that company must be worthless without anything other to offer than a name. You MUST rank for your usefulness! (or resources are being wasted)
I am not saying you shouldn't rank for your company name, of course you should, but that will come anyway with a properly written site. Your name does not belong in the title tag on every page of your site. Unless, of course, you just have 1 page on your site or your Ebay and the name fits easily and works for your marketing. The title should usually be a brief representation of that specific page. This does not always mean that page has something about your company in its content.
Next time you click a link, think about why you chose that one over others.
title tag: many times the most wasted or misused real estate on the Internet.
Your name does not belong in the title tag on every page of your site.
As netcommr stated previously, it's best to keep the important stuff first, so it makes sense to put the company name towards the end. Many companies like to have the company name in the title tag, usually first (Ugh), for marketing and branding purposes. Your company name will be naturally associated with the site. I prefer to brand my title tags. That's my preference and it's nothing written in stone.
The title tag is the one part that you can reliably count on being in the serps, so it must be compelling.
"Keyword-keyword-doublekeyword"
Eww. Looks like spam. Maybe they'll give me pop-ups.
"Red widgets, discount pricing: WidgetMaster, inc."
Oooooh! I want to click on that! They look reputable and reasonably priced!
I didn't elaborate, and maybe it's obvious or not but, in regard to "Red widgets, discount pricing: WidgetMaster, inc."
Search Engine Points
You're getting SE bonus points for "red widgets" "discount widgets" "pricing red widgets" and "discount red widgets." That's at least four keyword phrase combinations. Not to mention additional combinations from words located within the body text.
And Something for the Humans
The "red widgets" gives the surfers joy because it's just what they are looking for, then the "discount pricing" blurb compells them to click through to the web site.
He asked specifically for a greetings card website, and here the widget is the greeting card and not really the page topic.
In this case the site name, let's say GreetingCards.com, is much more valuable then some made up title for a greeting card like "sexy birthday greetings" for example.
I think people will never really search for the title (what is a title for a greeting card?!?!) or even specific motive (cartoon? funny? serious? dreamy?) of a greeting card.
Which title do you like better:
A dreamy encounter of beauty
or
GreetingCards.com > Get-well Cards > A dreamy encounter of beauty
Do you see my point?
I'm just saying that you should always consider your visitors relation to your site, not your own. Sometimes titles can say fairly little and a more global title can be more usefull.
SN
Write a Window Title with Good Visibility in Search Engines and Bookmark Lists
Begin the TITLE tag with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site. Don't start with words like "The" or "Welcome to" unless you want to be alphabetized under "T" or "W."
Here he's talking about the window title here, the title tag. And in a rather dated observation, he's talking about alphabetical order -- phone book marketing. In his printed books and studies he is adamant about using the company name first so that bookmarks are clear to the end user.
First, and I realize this applies only to a savvy user, when you bookmark a page you can change the title to whatever you want so that YOUR future reference is intuitive for you. I almost never allow a bookmark to stand with the original window title.
But as this discussion has uncovered, those first words are just too valuable from a marketing perspective to give them to the company name, time after time. No one will bookmark your page unless you can cut through the clutter and fisrt BRING them to your page.
I would consider putting the company name first only for the Home Page of a very large site, and even then, only if the company name includes a keyword. For inner pages, I find that the search engine value of every word in the TITLE, and therefore the targeted traffic that can be generated, mean too much to use the company name at all in most situations.
The targeting of an entire website is like a symphony, where each page is one instrument, one small moitif. When the window titles all hammer away on the same note with only minor variation, you've got a very minimalist symphony.
Also, tabbed browsing brings in a usability factor that wasn't really important when Dr. Nielsen wrote his words -- and it's a more important factor to me than any bookmarking or branding issue.
In most tabbed browser set-ups, the tab also displays the start of the page title. If the first phrase is always the company name, the tab doesn't do a good marketing job of reminding someone why they opened your page, unless you are as highly recognized as Amazon.com
My approach is that on a product page, a selling page that is, the product keyword begins the tag. On an informational page, the opening phrase is whatever facet of the total information space is emphasized on that page.
Dr. Nielsen is writing from a perspective that is:
1) quite a few years old and
2) highly colored by his work with enterprise level clients and their branding concerns
He doesn't really know the struggle that a small to medium business has simply to get one of their pages FOUND amid the 3 billion plus. The window title and the page headline are major arrows in the marketing quivver -- they help the little guy find a bullseye on their target market.
Things have moved on and search engines act differently ... Google probably wasn't even born.
What was good, in and trendy last year could be pants, out and naff this year.
