WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Good page titles - friendly SEO

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Jan 20, 2010 4:18AM

Hi Steven

The homepage and other key high-level pages of a website do benefit from
having the company name in them...you just don't want every single page to
begin with it for a number of reasons:

1. When you bookmark a page often you see only the first few words in
your bookmarks folder - having multiple pages bookmarked on a site that all
start with the same thing means your bookmarks are pretty hopeless
2. Pages do *not* get most of their page weight from the title tag
although you should include keywords here. Also, the further away from the
beginning of a title your keyword is the less weight search engines will
give it so keyword stuffing does not work.

The click-through rate is far more important than stuffing every last
keyword you have into a title.

In terms of using the company name in the title, I agree with you - but only
for high level pages....

The homepage should be something like:
[Company Name], [brief description including keywords], [location or area
served (if appropriate)]

Other high-level pages need the company name but their purpose (or
product/service) should be put first, e.g.:
Customer service policy | [Company Name]

...of course this is a little bit of a simplistic overview and should be
considered on a case by case basis, but the basic idea remains.

Writing good clear titles meets all your requirements for SEO, SERPs,
accessibility, and UX (e.g. bookmark quality) in one go...there is not
"clash of interest". There is little point in compromising any one of these
aspects for a small gain elsewhere.

Don't forget to write good meta descriptions too - these don't carry any SEO
weight but add quality to your SERPs making them a little more
accessibility-friendly.

Funnily enough I've been reading a similar discussion over on SEOmoz which
has not considered the accessibility of titles, and yet it comes to the same
conclusions - good practice is good practice :]