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I think that if you have an important, impressive, well-known brand that you can boost your SERP click through rate and conversion rate by including your brand in the title.  However, for a relatively unknown brand like mine there might be more valuable things to include in the limited title tag space.

These might include:

- free shipping

- kick ass price

- free ebook

- fast delivery

- biggest selection

- free beer

- a couple of extra keywords to pull traffic

All  of these can elicit clicks and put the buyer in the mood to do what I want him to do when he gets on my site.

I am not out to compete with Microsoft on branding.  I am out to get visitors onto my site and covert them - so I believe that in my situation the title tag space can be more wisely spent.

Yes, posts with a high "helpfulness score" or "SEOMoz endorsed"  can become a great archive and documents that can be linked to.

A knowledge base is being built here... a way to sluice the gold as it flows through will yield a treasure.

I agree....  I see a couple of options

How about a link or a side bar area that shows the threads that I have participated in that have received new replies?  (I'd like to keep my email inbox uncluttered and use it with a different browser.  You can still offer the email notice for people who want it and that way have the best of both.

Or, when a thread gets a new reply it goes back to the top of the list?  (I particularly like this option because great discussions are getting buried.  It will give everyone another chance to jump in.  Some forums have great threads that have been viewed thousands of times and have a hundred comments.  Here. the best and the least popular are rolling off the bottom of the page.

Why guess?  Try it and see if they pull any traffic from the SERPs.

Slap a couple of keywords onto the end of the title tag.

I would not spend time making them.  If they are nofollowed they are not supposed to be helpful for rankings.

Also, a lot of the blog comments with links that I see are very ignorantly worded and make the owner of the target website look like an illiterate fool.  And ignorant comments on a spammy blog might put a bad odor on your site.

They might be more valuable with the competitor's link on them. 

How big are you talkin' about?

If you look at the wikipedia article for Philadelphia you will find a really long page.  I took the sentence for the Postal Service that appears at the bottom of the page and found that Google indexed it from wikipedia and many other websites - over 2/3 of which were omitted because they were similar. See SERPs Here.

This tells you that Google routinely indexes content of that length.  You can try experiments for pages of even longer length to see how they are doing.

I have a lot of long articles on my site (4000 words plus) and they pull a ton of long tail traffic.  And, I like these really long pages because I believe that the huge content impresses visitors and earns links. That's the SEO value of a big page in my opinion.

Thanks bookworm!  Interesting ideas.

Jordan, Thank you for sharing your experience on this.  Glad to hear you are getting good results.

E

Time to quit the day job?

I really like .com domains compared to .net domains.

I also don't like hyphens in a domain.  They are very hard to communicate and hard to remember.  Lots of people will type your domain and forget the hyphen - so lost traffic.

I think that SuretyBondSoftware is easier for me to remember.

If you know that your market is software for the long term then I would probably move to the new domain.  However, if I had a lot of SEO in place on the old domain I would be a bit nervous about moving and suffering a some loss in the SERPs.

I thought about leaving it there and launching brand new content on Domain B... but need to get the action on the more appropriate domain before summer traffic arrives.

Thanks Steve,

I agree.

I have redirected a few domains with good to great results... just never tried it with a single page.

Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain.  That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords.

However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect.  Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content.

I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites.

Has anyone ever done this?  Did it work as you expected?  Did the content hold its rankings after being moved?

Any advice or philosophical opinions on this?

Thank you!

I think that with your knowledge and enthusiasm you will quickly earn enough MOZ Points to get free access to the Q&A Forum so the decision will be based upon how much you get out of the tools.

My opinion of risk goes up much higher if this is a directory vs a site with original content articles.

"(which will presumably have more SEO benefit)"

I agree.  I would go with putting the KB in a folder on the clients domain.  That way, links into the KB will be hitting the main site instead of a subdomain.

I have no factual data on this... just going with my gut....

Based upon how Google is acting these days I would not take chances with having two copies of the same site in the SERPs for an entire month.  I would not want to see any pages on the new site filtered for being duplicates.

Most people don't get a new site indexed and those redirected domains normally go fairly well. So, I would be pleased with that and not take chances.

Safety might be better than going for some unknown gain.

I would go straight to other webmasters - especially if they have a local blog that might cover your contest or sell you a banner ad.

Give nice prizes for the first ten entries that meet your rigorous specifications....  The first entries will set the tone for those that follow.  You want to start with some kickass stuff and not a bunch of slackers.

Advertise these as a "mystery contest" on local websites (use local websites because those people are already online and can click straight away to your site,)

Be friendly and encouraging but let them know that you expect good stuff.

Great content means beating the info sites.

So, go out to visit the best content sites in this niche and decide where you will beat them.

Content sites usually clobber retail sites in the SERPs so the best way to sell is to defeat them on one topic after another.

These content pages will pull traffic and links and social activity.

Plus they will feature your deep expertise. People believe and  like to buy from experts.