Branding the SERPS

We all know how important branding is. I’m sure each of you know of the brand leader in a few niches. In the programming niche, Experts Exchange is one of the brand leaders. For PHP scripts, HotScripts is the brand leader. For reviews, CNet is a brand leader.
If a lot of your traffic comes from search engines, you can help brand your site for free. Add the name of your site to the titles of your pages. Do it in a way that won’t upset your rankings though (i.e. no extraneous keywords). In my case I simply added “| DreamInCode.net” to my titles. This way users see my name in the SERPS and if they see it enough may think of my site when they think “programming help”.

I’ve been monitoring my rankings for a few weeks now and I haven’t seen any drastic changes. I modified around 200,000 pages and google has picked up several thousand of them so far. On average I’ve seen a +1 increase in rankings, but that can be attributed to some link building.