::Title Separators >> Order of Importance @@ keywords

strategies for creating effective page titles

[dvduval]

I saw the post about keyword separators, but I was wondering what is better in the title tag to separate phrases. For example, suppose we have a product name and a company name.

Product Name: Company Name
Product Name - Company Name

I've also seen artistic styles:

:: Product Name :: Company Name ::
~~ Product Name :: Company Name ~~

Also, I'm interested in how you decide about order importance of key phrases. All too often I see shopping carts that output..

Company Name: Product Name

..for every product. I tend to think this is not the best method because most likely you have already optimized for the company name on the homepage, so the product name is much important. I also think this helps to increase the variety of titles and therefore help increase the number of pages that will be indexed.

[Mohamed_E]

My gut feeling is that the search engine parser treats all separators as equal, so the choice is based on appearance. I, for one, prefer plain to fancy, but really do not believe that ':' vs '-' would have any effect on my choice of which title to click on. The fancy ones would probably put me off marginally, but that is only one customer's opinion.

Company Name and Product Name in title is an interesting question, the answer, I suppose, is the standard "It depends". If the company is a major brand I may well be searching for "Company X Prouct A" in that order, so Company Name - Product Name migt well be the optimal title. But if the company is obscure I may be searching simply for Product A, in which case Company Name would be diluting the title.

So we come back to the classic answers: Check your logs and experiment.

[pleeker]

I've always used

Product Name - Company Name

on client sites, and have never been displeased with (or noticed any impact on) how it affects SERPs. I also think it's easier to read after being bookmarked. Colon is sometimes hard to see against certain letters.