So a search bot is cruising the Web… Gathering links off of pages, dropping them into the queue to be analyzed for the index. The bot comes across a page and the title tag is:

The spider continues to look at the page and finds that the page is all about Spartaworks. The description tag includes the word “Spartaworks� and the word appears in the meta keyword tag, too. It shows up in the page headline and several times in the body copy of the page. The spider has no doubt what this Web page is about: Spartaworks.

There’s only one problem… What exactly is a Spartaworks?

This question is one that any small business needs to consider. If you have no branding to speak of, prospective customers will not be searching for your business by name. So should you optimize your Web site pages for your business name in an effort to rank for that name?

I don’t think so.

I’m not suggesting that a company name should not appear in the construction of your Web site. It absolutely should. But there are ways to include it so that the spiders associate it with the keyphrase relevancy of the Web page, which is the most important thing as far as ranking.

Let’s say there is a small camera store in northern Virginia called “Snapsalot� and it is the only location – a sole proprietorship. The little business has a brick and mortar location and an associated Web site, through which the proprietor sells cameras, film, accessories, etc.

Now let’s suppose that there is prospective buyer out there, living 600 miles away in Boston. The online shopper is looking for a new DynaMax 2000 Digital Camera. In a million years, would that person ever type “snapsalot� into a search engine to find his DynaMax 2000 camera? Nope. So, why would the owner of Snapsalot take the time and effort to optimize pages for his company name if no targeted prospects are going to be using that company name in the search?

Instead, the Web site owner would do well to optimize a page for the keyword “DynaMax 2000 digital camera.� This way, the search engine knows that the page is specifically about a DynaMax 2000 digital camera, the would-be customer also knows exactly what the page is about and most importantly, the page presents exactly what that prospect wants.

I’m not saying businesses should avoid their company name in their Web site design and construction. But I do think that branding and on-page optimization are different creatures, and most small business will get more bang for the optimization buck from using targeted keyphrases in their head tags and body copy, than by waxing poetic about a company name nobody knows about.

How about a title tag that looks like this…

No question whatsoever about what this page is about. Both the visitor and the bot have a very clear picture.

And if you still want to include some branding…

With this, you are telling the spider that your page is mostly about the dynamax 2000 digital camera, but you’re also referencing your brand and your geographic location, for good measure.

Don’t forget, the title tag isn’t the only on-page element that the bot is looking at. You’ll need to maintain keyword consistency across your tags, headlines, body copy and links for best results.

If every page on your Web site has the same title, and it is your company name, it might be time to re-think it. Branding is branding. Optimizing pages for targeted prospects is something different altogether.