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Ask HN: Convincing my cofounder not to drop brand name from title tag

6 points by joelhaasnoot ↗ HN
I've got a non-tech cofounder who thinks SEO is the best way to grow your brand. Currently about 50% of our traffic is from search engines. But he thinks we can do better so asked me to drop our brand from the end of the title on all of our pages. It's like a store with no sign or a letterhead with no company name. His explanation when asked why was that Google's formula is keywords/length of text, which is just not true. He thinks no one knows our brand, so it's better to focus on keywords. How do I convince him this is a bad idea, and to not only focus on keyword SEO? We have no blog entries, just listings and some descriptions. We have a few customers, some money is flowing, but there's not a lot of traction. SEO doesn't seem like a sustainable growth strategy now.

4 comments

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sga
The following article from seomoz speaks to this:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

Highlights:

- "70 characters is the maximum amount of characters that will display in the search results"

- "Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag"

- "Leverage Branding. Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach. The differentiating factor is the strength and awareness of the brand in the target market. If it is a well known brand, and it can make a difference in click-through rates in search results, the brand name should be first. If this is not the case, the keyword should be first."

Based on this you should keep the branding at the end and work on the up front content of the title tag. That content should be based on keyword formulations that are relevant to the page and targeted towards formulations that you have a chance of doing well with.

perry227
A pretty common solution is to put the keyword phrase first, followed by the brand name. Using a pipe between them garners a higher CTR in some cases for unknown (to me) reasons. That's how they do it here on HN except they put the brand name first. Either way.
petervandijck
Don't spend time on trivial stuff like this. There are likely 100 more important things you could discuss with your cofounder, or things you could do to improve traction. Decide either way, then move on. Even if it's with a coin-flip.
hasenj
It seems like a very subjective issue to me. What makes you think your opinion is more right?

Maybe dropping brand name from title tag is not a bad idea (even though your co-founder wants to do it for the wrong reason).

I think titles should be short and simple, and ideally not contain things like site name and whatnot. Except for the homepage, which should be only the brand name, and nothing else. e.g. just "Hacker News", as opposed to "Hacker News, your best source of interesting tech articles on the web!!!"

Considering tabs in most browsers are small, the user almost never ends up reading the title.

Titles are used as the default bookmark name in most browsers, so long titles with extra pointless words end up polluting bookmarks (most people don't bother renaming bookmarks).

I do agree though that SEO in general is not a good approach to building your brand (it borders on being spam in some sense). IMO the best way to build a brand is 1) making good products 2) having a good blog, like 37signals.