how to stop company name displaying when page title field empty

[tonybooth]

if you leave the page title empty, actinic then puts the company name in there. does anybody know how to stop actinic from putting the company name in there if the page title was left blank? is there some javascript with an 'if' statement i can change somewhere? or is it no so simple? i've had a look myself but cannot work it out.

thank you in advance for any help.

[Mark H]

Hi Tony - we started by just putting a space in Company Name (Business Settings) but of course the name then disappeared from other items (emails etc). After a lot of fooling about we now import the page title from the spreadsheet that runs all our products into a custom variable which has replaced the page title variable in Act_Primary.html. As well as getting rid of the company name, we can now generate page titles very quickly from product details within Excel, plus we get a longer page title (we operate a one product per section model - it might not work so well with more than one product per section). It is very important to Google to have a relevant page title - it should never be left blank. Mark.

[tonybooth]

still need help

thanks a lot for your input mark. but i'm hoping i can still get a more direct answer to my question. i will try to explain a little more so you can understand where i'm coming from.

i've been given a web site to do some seo work on. there are lots of pages without the page title filled in and so actinic puts the company name in there. there are also some pages with titles, which is fine. i just don't want the company name to appear (the company name is different from the site name), i am hoping i can automate the process so i don't need to read through every page having to work out which ones have titles and which ones don't. i know it's not good to have nothing there, thats something i will be taking care of with customvars.

my way of thinking is that somewhere in actinic, maybe there is a section of code that contains something that works the following logic:

if
page title is empty
then
display company name
else
display page title
end if

thanks again for any help offered.

[Mark H]

I think Actinic adds the company name to the beginning of the page title (when the title is added in the usual way) whether the title is empty or not - my answer would be to replace ALL the page titles with CustomVars and simply have a blank CustomVar value if you want no page title at all - this is what we have had to do. There might be some code to get round this but I can't help with that - hopefully someone else will be able to

[completerookie]

The page title element is one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.
Page title elements are normally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, no fluff, straight and to the point. This is what shows up in most search engine results as a link back to your page.

(from www.seoconsultants.com)

Do not under-estimate the importance of the title, if you are doing the seo job, then you should be trying to work out the correct group of words to describe the actual contents of the page and perhaps not just creating a catch-all type of job.

If you are unable to work out the correct mix of words (insufficient subject knowledge?) , then perhaps this IS a job for the client.

You must bear in mind that actinic is trying to do a "catch all job" on the web page being generated, at least this way, there is SOMETHING within the page title. - it may not be a perfect solution putting the company name, but at least there's something.