Should your company's name be in the title tag of your website?

[FrontlineMobility]

First of all, I would like to provide some background information. Our company is small. We are just now getting into SEO research and have been improving over a couple months of research. We are somewhere in the 500,000's in the world rankings. From what I understand, the title tag provides a great amount of weight to whatever keywords you set up. The words in the title tag are supposed to represent keywords that you want to be high in the search engines for, correct? Well, in our title tag, we have the name of our company. To me, this is a waste of space. No one is going to go to Google and search for our company's name because we are not that widely known. Looking back at our search history for customers, there has not been a single search for the company name. What someone is telling me, is that when we put our link somewhere, having the name of our company in the title tag strengthens the "link juice" we get from those links. Is this correct, or is it worth trashing the company name for another keyword to optimize?

[RobertFisher]

Justin, I have never heard anything about increased link juice based on company name. It sounds like they are describing anchor text in that the anchor text matching up with destination content. (Actual words displayed in the link matching the content of the page the link is to). The title tag is important, but with regards to your company name (your brand) it it is new or not well known it is not as important...now.

What I would suggest is that if the name is not too long (you have 70 characters to work with), put it in and follow this format;

Keyword phrase or keywords here | Company Name

My reasoning is that you may someday have more brand than today and this is a way to help get that. (If you just don't care for that, you can not use it though.) Also, do not just randomly put keywords in the title tag. Use what fits the menu, url structure, and the content on the page.

You may be new, but SEOmoz is a great resource for anyone. You landed in the right spot.

[FrontlineMobility]

The problem with the whole Brand thing is this: we are a distributor of many different brands, and we do not have our own except for the company name itself.  (I hope this makes sense).  I don't think we have thought as far ahead as to whether we want to "have more brand" in the future.  Thank you for the quick response and the info.  We pretty much have the correct setup you have mentioned with the keywords we have chosen to optimize.  Thank you, once again.

[FrontlineMobility]

Thank you so much for the feedback.