If you are trying to optimise a client’s website, you may find the brand team have different views on SEO.
Brand team are obsessed about how their brand is displayed which is their job. However, it can sometimes prevent their site from being completely optimised.
Page title is one example – they want to have the brand at the front of the title tag and keywords at the end, if at all. SEO gurus often have to compromise and agree with brand. But what is the best solution?
Below I have summarised three articles and their opinion on page title.
SEO PPC PROS recommends:
Place the keywords first in the title tag. This is the first place most people look and this is the first place the search engines look when reading your site, therefore you want this to be the first place you want your keywords.
This article also highlights the problem that I have faced from brand that want the title tag to look like
“Company name – keywords”
I like what the article said about the branding department. “There are a lot of people who think branding is so important for everything in marketing because that’s what they learned in college and from there marketing managers in the 90s.” This is so true. The article suggests to remove your brand from the first characters of your page title if at all possible and find a way to put your most valuable keywords there instead.
Randfish offers some more advice about title tags – I have just picked a feW
1. Brand your traffic
Rand suggests using the title of your site or brand at the beginning or end of every title tag.
2. Limit length to 65 characters (including spaces) or less
3. Incorporate keyword phrases
4. Target longer phrases if they’re relevant
For example a title tag like “SkiDudes | Downhill Skiing Equipment & Accessories” is better than “SkiDudes | Skiing Equipment” if there is content about Downhill skiing equipment and accessories on the page.
5. Use a divider
Rand recommends using the “|” symbol (aka the pipe bar). Other are the arrow “>” or hyphen “-” and both work well. ”
6. Be consistent
When you have a good formula for your page titles that works, then stick to it.
7. Repeat in the headline
Re-use the title tag of each page as the H1 header tag can be valuable from both a keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement.
This article states that the keywords should be in the first few words of the title tag. It should be used no more than twice. The title should have capitals on each work except for the minor words such as a, and, an, the and should be 65 characters with no special characters.
If you know of any other good points to raise, please let me know.