The title should have the most important keywords in it, I prefer they be as close to the start as possible. Having the company name in the title is a branding issue. But I'd put it after the main keywords if you put it in the title at all.

The description is another issue. Google seems to use them a lot as the snippet for the serps, so you probably want to pay close attention to them. This might be a better place to put the company name. I'm not sure it matters if the keywords or the comapny name come first in the description, but look carefully at the serps and see how many characters show in the snippets so you can get the maximum benefit from what you write there.

Thanks ken_b, do you think it's necessary to put the company name in the title? Or should it be the main topic or main keywords of the company? Google doesn't allow to many characters in the title.

Put the keywords in the title, and the company name only if there's room. Or, if your boss is putting your back to the wall, put the company name at the end, even if it doesn't show up in the search engines' link.

I'm constantly amazed by companies that just have the name in the title. If a company can't be found for its own name, they've got trouble.

You've got a good point there, our company name is our most popular keyword. Probably because that is what we have at the very beginning of each title for each page.

What do you mean, most popular keyword?

I agree wtih dickbaker's observation to the extent that no page, with the possible exception of the homepage, should have the site/brand name all by itself in the title.

But IMHO, every company's name should be in the page titles, and every company's name should be it's strongest kw. As ken_b says, it's a branding issue. If a company's strongest kw is NOT its brand name, THEN the company is really in trouble. ;-)

Ask the PPC players what kw's they most want to bid on, and frequently are barred from doing so? Why do you think that is? :-)

What I mean by most popular keyword, which I guess I phrased wrong, is the main purpose or goal our company, e.g., "widget manufacturing." Our company name is not 'Widget Manufacturing' or 'Bills Widget Manufacturing' but that is what we want our website to come up under in the search engines. Currently our most popular search phrase is our company name, which means they already know about us.

I don't understand your ppc comment...

[edited by: caveman at 5:37 pm (utc) on Mar. 27, 2007]
[edit reason] Widgetized [/edit]

PPC comment: People who search on brand/business names almost invariably convert better than others, because they already know and trust the business enough to search for it by name. For that reason, PPC bidding is very effective as an affiliate, for example, if you can buy clicks on brand names.

Don't give up the brand name of your company in the page title. The page title is the single most important element of on-page optimization.

Go look at eBay or Amazon for example, and a bunch of other brand name sites. eBay doesn't have an awareness problem at this point. But there's their brand upfront on every page title. Hmmmm, wonder why? Actually, there are a bunch of reasons, from branding & brand awareness, to click-through. ;-)

I can understand building a brand that may possibly appeal to the masses, but that's not the nature of our business so I don't think it translates.

caveman, thanks for backing up my opinion, at least to that extent.

Let me offer up an example. Let's say that a site owner wants to get ranked for a particular page for the terms "blue widgets" and "red widgets." (I would suggest that they be two separate pages, but that's just my paranoia).

From learned posters here, I've been told that the SE's really don't go beyond eight or nine keywords in the title tag.

So, let's say that brancook is trying to get ranked for "blue widgets" and "red widgets."

Where would be the problem in having a page title that would read, "Blue widgets--Red widgets--Widgets from Acme.com"?

The company name is still in the title tag, although further down the food chain.

I have some retail stores on my site with very generic company names. "Bob's widget store," for example. I would bet you that there's hundreds if not thousands of widget stores in the US alone with that name.

So, how to differentiate between a "Bob's widget store" in one city, versus a store with the same name in another city?

By devoting an "about us" page with the title "Bob's widget store [insert city and state here]." If that's not enough, then narrow it down further.

brancook: "I can understand building a brand that may possibly appeal to the masses, but that's not the nature of our business so I don't think it translates."

Could you elaborate on that problem, without violating the terms of service here on WebmasterWorld?

brancook, as dickbaker alludes, you have not really exemplified your situation, so it's hard to help past a point. You say that "Our company name is not 'Widget Manufacturing' or 'Bills Widget Manufacturing' but that is what we want our website to come up under in the search engines."

I'm presuming from that comment that your company's name is not "Bill's" but something like "Bills". And you say that you want to rank for "Bills Widget Manufacturing."

I can understand building a brand that may possibly appeal to the masses, but that's not the nature of our business so I don't think it translates.

I run small and medium sites, and consult for small, medium and large sites, and so far have never found a situation where it doesn't translate.

If the brand name is distinctive, like eBay, you want to continue reinforcing it for reasons noted above and more. If the brand name is not unusual, i.e., like "Bill's", then you have an ocean of potentially competitive sites out there that you want to beat on searches for "Bill's Widget Manufacturing" ... and if you're llike me ... you also want to rank for "Widget Manufacturing" and "Bill's." ;-)

You will need both sets of terms in your homepage page title for that to happen, and probably "Bill's" in the title of every page...just for starters. (dickbaker's suggestion above is one good approach, except that there should not be three instances of the term "widgets" in the title.

After that there are hundreds of other things you can do to rank for "Bill's Widget Manufacturing" and "Widget Manufacturing" and "Bill's Widgets" and even "Bill's". Though admittedly most small businesses don't have the resources to go after ranking well common brand name like "Bill's".

I guess one good way to describe what we do is, we make the widgets for another person's brand. We are behind the scenes, we test, validate, manufacture and ship the widgets. People come is us with their widget idea and we work with them to make it work. Our target market isn't as big as ebay or amazon or best buy.

I did put or keywords at the front of the page titles and moved our company name to the back. That seemed like a good idea to me at this point.

brancook, even though you're not appealing to the masses, you're appealing to companies. I would assume that there's a term for what you do that's known in industry, yes?

Caveman, why do you say that you wouldn't put "widgets" in the title three times? I have pages that say "Acme products, Acme widgets, Acme stuff," and I rank well for those terms.

Over repetition of kw's in titles is an old tactic, and SE's years ago got pretty aggressive at filtering for it.

Unless the page and site have tons of link juice, and sometimes even if they do, it's a very easy way to get pages suppressed in the SERP's. Can't tell you how many times I've consulted on sites and started by cleaning up that problem, before anything else. Fixing that is one of the easiest ways around of bring pages up in the SERP's. It's related IMHO to what people used to refer to as the OOP (Over Optimization Penalty). It's not really a penalty. Just a reaction on the SE's part when to "manipulation" of the SERP's, which as you know, they don't care much for.

Also, I distinguish between brand name and generic terms in titles. The SE's have gotten pretty good at identifying brand names, and seem more forgiving with repetition of brand name in page titles and anchor text.

In your Acme example it's the brand name that is used three times. I don't know if that was intentional, but there is a better chance of getting away with that than there is of getting away with your earlier example of "Blue widgets--Red widgets--Widgets from Acme.com?", where it's the generic "widgets" that is used three times. In the latter case, I believe most pages would suffer in the SERP's for searches on blue or red widgets.

One of the easiest ways of depressing a page's rankings is to put widgets in the title three or more times, start the H1 with widgets, link to the page internally with only the term widgets, and get most of the external anchor text to start with the term widgets. A site and page need a lot of trust before that works well. ;-)

Caveman, you mention link juice and anchor text in the last post. I've been really afraid of linking from other sites basically because I really don't know the proper way to do it. Currently most if not all of the links that come in to our site from others site(mostly directories) are basically just our website www.acme.com with the anchor text being our company name.

Is it true that you really want the link coming in to your site to be for example 'widgets' or 'blue widgets' rather than just your company name.

Our site is over 10 years old and we avg. about 100 visitors per day, half that on the weekends. We spend a ton of money on pay per click.

The text of links inbound to your site's pages says as much to the SE's about what the linked to page as anything, especially since in many cases those links are (theoretically) "votes" for your site's pages from around the Web. In practice some Webmasters have a fair amount of control over their inbound links, but the search engines discourage that kind of "manipulation".

Essentially, the more inbound links your site has, the better, and the more natural those links look, the better. The keywords that are contained in the anchor text of those links are also critical. If you run a company, it's natural that lots of the links into your site will contain your company's name. It's also natural that many of those links will contain other kw's that suggest to the SE's the nature of any given page linked to.

It's a good bet, for example, that a link with the anchor text "Bill's Widget Manufacturing - Precision Quality Widgets for Discerning Producers" is pointing to a a site that makes high quality widgets for other companies. The SE's take this strongly into account when deciding how to rank that page.

But the topic of this thread is mainly about kw placement in titles and descriptions, so let's not take it too off topic here. You may want to search more on the value of anchor text in links. It's a biggie. ;-)