A good META title for a front page....

[ChrisHolgate]

Hi,

We recently asked for some pointers to use on our site bit.ly/4Cogch as one of our SEOmoz private questions.  One of the points that was picked up was that the title of the homepage looked quite spammy:

Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner

I completely see this however I've checked out our competition and no one seems to be doing things any better and the SEOmoz On Page SEO tool seems to like it so I'm not sure what changes to make.

Does anybody have any inspiration that I could possibly use?  It was suggested that Google is quite brand focused and so I should integrate the company name but how else would you change things, bearing in mind the ink and toner market that we're focusing on?

Thanks for your help!

Chris

[irvingw]

Of course all title tags should be unique and main keyword should target that product so if you have a section about laser cartridges it might be something like this

Main Laser Page (general)

Buy Laser Printer Cartridges | Toner Cartridge in Color and Black Ink

Laser Product Page (more specific)

Xerox 2030xp Laser Printer Cartridges | Color Ink Toner Cartridge

[TomRayner]

Hi Chris, sorry for not getting back sooner.

I think you can be confident that Google will recognise your brand name if its included in all of your titles.  Case in point, if you look at the SEOMoz site - 'SEOMoz' is repeated on pretty much every page, of which there must be hundreds of thousands.

[ChrisHolgate]

Lovely, thanks again buddy - Very much appreciated   

[irvingw]

If the name of your site is your brand name there should be no need to waste valuable title tag space, because with the name in the domain and a few times in the page content you should rank for that already.

[ChrisHolgate]

That's cool.  It did seem odd including my brand since we are a small company however the advice given in the private question was specifically to include the brand name.  Unless there are any advances I'm going to change the title now as per Irving's advice to:

Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers

Thanks again for your help guys.

[Martin_Harris]

I think when it comes to branding you have access your business aims, industry,  current keyword performance and competition.

A lot of people will drop it in the meta title and say "its for branding" without understanding what the impact will be.

Ask yourself would having my brand name in the meta title encourage a branded search the second time round?

How well do people know my brand?

Would i generate more sales from a higher search position because of  a shorter Meta title tale?

Unless you are dealing with a national retailer, I'd focus on high traffic keywords for the homepage and then optimize the rest of your keyword targets through better landing pages.

[MikeRoberts]

Here are title tag best practices straight from SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag that may help.

[ChrisHolgate]

Many thanks Irving; that's spot on.

One question, would you suggest leaving off our brand name entirely?

Thanks again.

[irvingw]

a) Don't repeat any keyword more than once

b) If inkjet and laser are different those should have their own landing pages

c) I doubt cheap is as valuable as you think

Original:  Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner

Updated: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> 
Notice a singular and plural instance of "cartridges" and also a singular and plural "printers" which is probably an important keword missing. 
Also we still get "buy" "ink" "toner" "inkjet" and "Laser" in the title

Also reads better

[ChrisHolgate]

Many thanks Tom.  With regards to the Brand Term would you suggest my company name or some brands that we stock - I'm guessing the former but I'm thinking if this gets included on more than a couple of pages I could suffer duplication issues.

In my mind this seems unspammy and unlikely to conflict with other page titles such as 'Toner Cartridges' and 'Inkjet Cartridges'.  I would also plan to leave the company name off of any other titles.

Low Cost Printer Cartridges | Refresh Cartridges

It does seem very untargeted however.

[Andropenis_Australia]

How about:

Cheap Inkjet printer cartridges & laser toner ink cartridges

It is hard to figure out a non spammy title when you want to advertised many similar things in your title. But the above seems ok and naturally written to me.

All the best

[TomRayner]

There's a couple of things I'd take issue with this title.

First of all, as you mentioned, I'd want to include a brand term.

Second, the title is 79 characters - the general consensus is that you should limit your title to 70 characters, as any more might either be abbreviated by Google in the SERPs, or even replaced altogether by Google, which will then pick what it thinks is the most appropriate title. Source.

Third, by having that many keywords, you're diluting the 'strength' you would get from it.  By limiting to 1 or 2 keywords, more of a 'focus', as it were, would be attributed to those keywords.  Furthemore, you could then optimise internal pages of the site with the other keywords, which in turn could help build up overall domain authority if you choose to link-build to those pages.

Fourth, there is a case that this could be seen as over-optimisation by Google.  And we all know what over optimisation might lead to in the future.

I wouldn't worry about what your competition is doing.  The title tag's strength has been weakened over the years, but having a particularly spammy one could do more harm than good in the future.  I would focus on two keywords at the most per page, and as I mentioned earlier, this means you could optimise internal pages for the other term, which in turn could build domain authority.