Web Toastie

When thinking about the title of a website, there has been a bit of debate about whether it is necessary to have the business or website name included. If the brand name should be present, where should it appear?

After attending the Think Visibility conference in Leeds last weekend, I sat through a fantastic usability talk by Fiona Thomson that made me think about the importance of branding within titles.

During an eye-tracking video that Fiona showed us, an interesting segment stood out. The user was scanning a list of Google results for shopping websites (I think) and they were focusing on the website URL as opposed to the title or description. When Fiona explained, she said that the user was looking for a familiar brand, and when they didn’t see the website they wanted, they tried searching a different phrase.

So this begs the question, is branding more important in the title or URL of a website? (or both?)

This technique of filtering the search results was only demonstrated by one person, so I appreciate the test may not be an accurate representation of users, but it was certainly interesting.

SEOmoz have a “Best Practices for Title Tags” article, which says:

Use the title of your site or brand at the beginning or end of every title tag to help searchers know where they’re going and to increase return visits.

Applying the above theory means a title should look roughly like this:

Brand Name | Descriptive Text or Phrases

Or similarly:

Descriptive Text or Phrases | Brand Name

But is it a necessity that the name appears within the title tag? Personally I don’t think so. The theory “it helps to increase return visits” is a bit poor in my opinion. A user will decide whether the website is a good candidate to return to once they have actually been on the site and seen the content. How often do you go on a website and look at the blue title bar at the top of the page? I don’t ever do it, but maybe that’s just me.

The same article from SEOmoz states that the length of a title tag should be limited to 65 characters at maximum. Perhaps it would be better to save on space when constructing the tag by excluding the brand name? This would leave more room to target key phrases.

I can understand the theory of brand awareness within search results, but there are alternatives to using the title tag, such as the page description and even just the website URL (as the eye-tracking video proved).

What are your thoughts on the importance of branding within website titles?

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