SEO Explained - Page 7
Location & Brand in your titles

Location based searching, and its impact on <title>

Many people type locations into Google for products and services which they are looking for locally.  So for a website company in Melbourne, like Salsa – who have the majority of our clients based in Melbourne, optimising for the word Melbourne, and to a lesser extent Australia is important.

Our website home page title is:
Websites, Melbourne Website Design, Salsa Internet, Joomla SEO, Melbourne, Australia, Web Design, Sydney.

In arranging this sequence and layout  - we hope to achieve the strongest matching (exact & sequence) on the following terms:
(Websites Melbourne, Melbourne Website, Melbourne Websites (through stemming of website), Melbourne Website Design, Website Design, Website Design)

….and a lesser match (due to the terms appearing later in the phrase or being out of sequence) on:

(Joomla Melbourne, Melbourne Joomla, Joomla Australia, Australia Joomla, Melbourne SEO, SEO Melbourne, SEO Australia, Melbourne Web Design, Australia Web Design, Joomla Web Design).

So you can quickly see that despite only using 4 or 5 keyword phrases in your title, that through sequence and word stemming, you can achieve a match against as many as 20 or 30 variants of these terms if you carefully construct your page titles.

Use of Brand / Company Name in your <title>

Whether to insert your company name in your title, and where to include it (first, or later in the title) is a subject of much debate.  Because the title tag appears as the listing in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) this is an important consideration in how your company is represented in response to users' searching.   There are two common perspectives on this:

Brand Marketers: say that representing your brand prominently online is most important, and worthy of any lost opportunity in pushing more commonly searched terms to the beginning of your <title>.

Pure SEO: In the technical process of SEO, the first words are more important, and so you’d be wanting to match keywords that users are searching for….and therefore your Brand / Name might appear later in the <title> if at all (ie it may not even be considered worthy of including as it takes up valuable keyword space in the <title>).

As you can see above, at Salsa (Title: “Websites, Melbourne Website Design, Salsa Internet, Joomla….”)  we take the view that having our brand displayed in the search results for our home page is important – but not the most important factor.   We’d prefer to appear a couple of positions higher in the results rank, than have our brand displayed as the first part of our <title>.

Page 8 - Technically implementing your new titles