In my recent article on title tag optimization, I mentioned that small business owners shouldn’t feel bad about having keyword-barren title tags because some Fortune 100 companies do the same thing.
The best example of a bad title tag I’ve seen is the one I showed in the article: the General Dynamics homepage, which has “Home” as its title tag. There are plenty of other companies that just use their company name in their homepage title tag, either by itself (see GM), with a tagline (see GE) or with something like “Welcome to …” (see Citi).
Unlike General Dynamics — where it looks like no one has thought about SEO and where they’re not even getting the SEO benefit of having their company name in the title tag — it’s less clear in these latter cases whether leaving off keywords on the homepage is a good decision or not. One could argue that not cluttering up the homepage title tag in these cases is a good move, because their brands are so well known (and get such high search volume) and/or because their product line is diverse and they want non-brand keyword traffic to go to other pages on their site. But if I were in charge of the sites for these companies, I’d still be inclined to use some keywords in their homepage title tags. It just seems like too valuable an opportunity to pass up.