Hi there,
First off, a warning. Appearing in the first page in Google results
for "sympathy gift" and its plural is excellent. Any tinkering you do
puts that position at risk.
Title tags are very important, and can give you a significant
advantage over webmasters who do not realise it. The downside is the
difficulty in finding the best balance, because the ideal title needs
to:
1) Make sense and stand out when someone places it in their bookmarks
or favorites
2) Be optimized to help the page rank highly in search results
3) Appeal to searchers, so that when they see it in search results,
they click on it.
An optimization expert says
---------------------------
Search engine expert Brett Tabke answered a similar question at
WebMasterWorld, and he says that:
- keywords should be as close to the beginning as possible
- shorter titles are better
- two-word phrases should be just that, without other words in-between
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10003/3426.htm
Your business name
------------------
It is almost standard practice to have your business name in the title
of each page withing your website. This is the most difficult aspect
of title optimization.
Reasons for having it:
- the name of the site is probably what the person will look for in
their bookmarks
- when someone searches for your business name, they might not notice
it in search results if the name doesn't appear in the title
- it looks better in search results,
Reasons against:
- typically your visitors will not be searching for company's name, so
it's a waste of keywords
- if they are searching for your company by name, it will probably
come up #1 in results, regardless of what the title says
Removing it will increase the ranking for any of your pages, but only
you can decide whether to keep your business name in page titles or
not.
Your Home Page
--------------
Your home page does very well with the current title. And you have
indicated that you like keeping the company name there, so I would
leave it as it is, and focus on the product pages.
Unless, that is, you have access to statistics which tell you the
keywords people searched for to find your homepage. Your web host may
have those figures available for you. Alternatively, you could get a
third-party to provide the info:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authoring/Free_Services/Counters_and_Trackers/Premium/
If you knew that 90% of your visitors arrived by searching for
"sympathy gifts", I'd shorten the home page title to:
The Comfort Company - Quality Sympathy Gifts
or:
The Comfort Company - Sympathy Gifts
or better still:
Sympathy Gifts from The Comfort Company
Reducing the number of words in the title, but retaining the phrase,
should improve your ranking. Having "sympathy gifts" at the beginning
of the title is the optimal place. Changing the title tag is unlikely
to get you up to #1. For that to happen you need to also try and get
more quality links pointing to your site.
I would also keep the company name in the titles of pages like About
Us, Contact Us, Shipping Information.
Product Pages
-------------
For product pages, you need to choose keywords that appear somewhere
on the page, and are something that folk search for. You have
correctly identified "sympathy gift" as a good keyphrase.
Use Overture's keyword popularity tool, and search for 'sympathy'
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Then search for hand-stitched.
Ordinarily I would suggest just having a 2-3 word product name or
category in the title of product pages. But after browsing your site,
I couldn't find many product names that people would search for. My
suggestion is that you use the Overture tool for each product, to see
how many searches are made.
If there are many, just have the product in the title:
Flower Vase
If there are few:
Sympathy Gift - Hand-Stitched Pillows
The important thing is to have a different title for every page of
your site, to increase the chances of one of them appearing high in
search results.
Wait
----
Unfortunately any changes you make will not be reflected in search
results until next month's Google update, and possibly even the month
after that.
As usual, if any part of my answer is unclear, or if you have further
questions on this topic, just ask for a clarification.
Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga |
