Writing Search Engine Friendly Titles
A Cre8asite Forums thread is picking at Rand's post this week on Best Practices for Title Tags. First go read his post and then come back here to read the forum commentary on it.
Cre8asite Forums Admin, Bill Slawski, also well known for his outstanding SEO By The Sea blog, goes through some of his points.
The first is about branding your titles with your brand name. I.e. Company Name - Keywords Here. As you can see here, I do not include the name of the blog in the titles for the individual pages. I personally agree that branding is not that important when it comes to SEO titles. Bill says, "branding is something that you could take advantage of in title elements, but it's probably not the place to attempt to build a brand - there are better ways to do that." He explains that putting company name on the contact us page, about us page, etc are smart ideas. I would also put the brand up and front on the home page page title. But there are two schools of thought on this and go with which you prefer.
Bill then looks at the tip to repeat the title phrase in your header tag. I agree that there is nothing wrong with this, but if you want to change it up slightly, that is also fine.
Finally, he added to the list, putting the title of the page in your breadcrumb trail (the links at the top of the page that tell you where you have clicked). Often, it is not able to fit it all in there, so matching the title tag to the breadcrumb trail is often not feasible.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
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rustybrick in Search Engine Optimization at January 25, 2007 7:37 AM
Comments (3)

Comments
this blog is on Google page One for.... SEO
and on page Five for ....SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
... Two very admirable achivements
Judging by the fact that both THIS blog - SearchEngineWatch BLOG and SearchEngineRoundtable are on Page 11 for the very competative term......SEARCH ENGINE
It is quite possible that including 'SEO' or 'Search Engine Optimizaton' in this blog's homepage Title would actually have an impact on higher ranking for those terms....
This would be quite interesting to see, only because these are very valid terms for this blog's title - - and it would demonstrate TECHNICALLY, how much impact literal keywords still have on the SERPs
Posted by SearcH EngineS WeB at January 25, 2007 08:22