We do a lot of SEO evaluations. It's one of the ways we use to get leads from our website. One SEO Tip we can make after looking at a lot of corporate websites is don't put your company name on every single website page. This error is probably one of the most common we see day in and day out. Most sites today use a content management system like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress and the development company puts the company name into the site name and then the site name goes on every page as a default. O
When an systems is setup like this you end up getting a Page Title that looks like this:
Your Company Name | Title of the page
or
Title of the page | Your Company Name
The problem with this is that when Google comes along to index your site, it has no idea what your site is about, so it looks in the HTML for clues. One place it looks is in the page title, which is what you see in your tag on your browser. If you keep using your company name over and over again, you end up indexing your company name a lot in Google's search engine. This is great you say...so when someone Googles "My Company Name" I will be first. That's true, you will be. But unless you are Nike or Coke, you don't have massive brand recognition, so while you may get a bit of traffic from your name, you are missing out on people looking for your services.
Let's take an example of Bob who has a landscaping service called Bob's Earth Movers. He ranks number one for his name because there is no one else out there with a name called Bob's Earth Movers and someone linked to him using the text "Bob's Earth Movers" so Google knows that someone out there knows Bob's Earth Movers is in fact bobsearthmovers.com and has linked to the site. So it's easy to rank number one for your brand name.
However, people are going to Google something else like "Landscaping in New Jersey" to try and find landscaping services in NJ. So on Bob's home page, we would set up something like this:
Bob's Earth Movers | New Jersey Landscaping
On Bob's website, we would set up a page called Landscaping Services and each page might look like this:
Lawn Maintenance | Landscaping Services NJ
and so on...adding as many keywords based on our keyword research that people are searching for and aren't super competitive.
The other thing to be aware of in Google as well is the fact that Google will cut off page titles that are more than 70 characters with a .... so if you try and add more than 70 characters you will see a ... after your page title and it won't look as clean as the other results in the Google search.
So our adivce is put your company name on your home page only along with your industry and use the other pages for more product related keywords.