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Re: Good page titles - friendly SEO

for

From: Steven Henderson
Date: Oct 13, 2009 4:10AM


I like your reasoning for putting the company name first on the home page
... I've never thought of approaching it that way exactly, I must admit.

Again, the max length is something else I like to adhere to also, although I
think how the title is written is really a usability issue - so long as
there is one, and it is applied correctly, I think it is fair to say it will
be as accessible as any other - but agree a good friendly title is
beneficial to both users and search engines. That is where I get frustrated
with the plethora of high ranking pages that are what I deem spam-titles
that I just naturally skim past ... perhaps I am more of a cautious user,
but if they are getting high rankings, isn't it then the fault of users that
they're ranking well? Or am I possibly missing something?




-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Simius Puer
Sent: 13 October 2009 10:52
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Good page titles - friendly SEO

Where a long page title has been created in order to improve SEO this is
normally done by some poor mis-led individual or a black-hat SEO.

Page titles are important for SEO but the value of each word diminishes the
further towards the end of the title it is. Thus the last words in a long
title will carry little or no value.

In terms of using the company name this is a tricky one. I normally advise
putting the company name first only on homepages as this is where people
will generally want to "land" if they have searched for the company. On all
other pages I would suggest pushing the company name to the end as this
allows you to focus on getting the keywords right up front.

Don't forget all the major search engine's results pages have a limit to how
many characters they display in a page title...a very good guideline as to
the max length of your text!

SEO and accessibility meet very nicely here as it is in both the user and
the search engines best interest if your title is succinct, focused around
your keywords and generally well written.