Just out of curiosity, what’s your strategy for page names/titles?
I don’t think that Page Names have anything to do with how they get into
search results, but once the page name is displayed in a search result, it
has everything to do with how users choose to view that result. The first
several words of a page title are usually all anyone sees, so if you get
hung up on branding strategies, like
Great Big Giant Amazing Company | Toasters that also butter your
bread and more amazing products
You then end up with truncated search results like this
Search Result: Great Big Giant Amazing Co…
Now imagine all your search results for that website
Search Result: Great Big Giant Amazing Co…
Great Big Giant Amazing Company | Toast…
Great Big Giant Amazing Company | Better…
Great Big Giant Amazing Company | Seven…
Great Big Giant Amazing Company | Possib…
And you begin to get the idea.
So I have tried to relax my insatiable desire to manage branding by
tattooing every forehead and think along the lines of what users find
valuable in their decision making. So, I try swapping positions and title
pages like so
Toasters that also butter your bread and more amazing products by
Great Big Giant Company
Again, I don’t think this effects page ranking in search results – but
when they do show, truncation does not work against their relevance to the
USER’s decision-making
Search Result: Toasters that also butter…
Better quality breadknives that slice like…
Seven handy kitchen items you must have…
Possibly the finest collection of sporks…
The branding side of me still complains that the first method works better
for bookmarking, reminding the user where to go to find amazing stuff…
However, the user-experience side seems to feel that consumer loyalty is a
lost cause (Sweet Jesus!!!)
So, it’s not set in stone for me.
offtopic mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options