I think there are three possibilities. Grabbing the generic product name and putting your company site there seemed like a good idea in the early days of the web, and a tiny number of companies are still stuck with that. I'd never suggest that nowadays. People expect to find your company website at [your company name].com, so it needs to be there. A second possibility is to register an "exact match domain" and put the relevant information there, so instead of information about your red widgets being on your company site, they'd be on the spinoff red-widgets.com site. This would probably work well for "red widgets" searches (i.e you might well come higher than you would if the information was on your main company site), but it's not great for branding, and it does rather dilute the strength of your overall offering in Google.

The third possibility, which I'd recommend, is to keep all the product information together on your main company website, but to set up an independent "exact match domain" around any individual product types or technology issues. Try to be genuinely useful to the visitor, but of course then direct them to your company website as an example of where they can buy the products or services described. A site called red-widgets.com with as few as half a dozen pages telling visitors everything they need to know about red widgets can do extremely well in Google. There's a nice discussion on the subject in Should You Buy An Exact Match Domain Name? on SEObook.

Domain names with the product in. Any good?

Apparently, nearly a quarter of web searches are "navigational"; in other words, the searcher just wants to find your site. They either don't know or care about Red Widget Company's website address but expect a Google search on the company name to provide the right result, or they do know it's "www.redwidgetcompany.co.uk" but find it easier to just type "redwidgetcompany" into the Google box.

OK, now you're thinking you've got that potential pitfall covered, because you're number one in Google for your company name. But what does that result look like? Might there be a more attractive-looking option just below yours, which suggests that if someone is after contact details for the company, it might find them quicker there? For example, when I search Google for "Mocap Custom Molding Group" (I could have chosen hundreds of examples), the first result is indeed the company's website, but the title is just a rather boring "Custom Molding / Tooling" …whereas the second result is the far more attractive "Mocap Custom Molding Group web site, latest news and contact details" – which is a page on an independent news site*. But that's another site completely, and do you want searchers going there? Some will.

So if nothing else, make sure the first Google result for your company name is not only your site, but screams "this is the official company website" too. That means having the title tag on the home page starting off with your company name, and if you can add in a descriptive slogan, with a product keyword, in the remainder of the 60 characters, that's fine.

*In this example above, the runner-up spot is held by a respectable news site. But it's often one of those "directory sites", and this explains why these rather pointless sites seem to continue to send you traffic. It's not that people use them as directories (why would anyone need a directory, when Google's around?), but it's because people searching for your company on Google click on their site instead, then click through to yours from the entry on the directory site. If a site which is no more than a list of company names and addresses rings me up and says "Aren't we clever, we sent 20 people to your website last month", I just think no, you just misled 20 or more people who'd typed my company's name into Google. And as they probably spent about 0.5 seconds on your site, no, I don't want to advertise, thanks.

Number one for your name. But is that enough?

What does this mean? It means that you're going to be more likely to see the big name providers at the top of the Google results in future. And although most of us don't deal in the sort of ultra-competitive areas where changes are already being seen (insurance, diets, airline tickets etc), there's no reason why this won't filter down to industrial products in time. There's a long discussion at WebmasterWorld which you might enjoy if you're intrigued about where all this is leading.

But the big question is "how do we get ourselves established more strongly as a 'brand' within our market?", and that's not going to be easy to answer. The good news is that you're already halfway there just by being a proper manufacturer or distributor. The websites which have most to fear are third-party sites: directories and publications, for example.

We probably need to think like Google. How would it set about identifying 'brands'? From the mass of data it has, such as the keywords companies are bidding on in AdWords, Google will be able to work out every possible generic product description in every market, from uPVC windows to spectrophotometers. Then it needs to work out who the manufacturers and distributors are, using its mass of search and advertising data. I can see how that might be possible too. After that, it needs to work out the most important brands, and that's where things are going to be harder, especially in the (relatively!) obscure worlds which we deal in. Spotting the important ones in consumer markets is much easier – in social media, people will be talking about "Rolex watches" or "Nike trainers" all the time. In industrial markets, that won't happen as much, but individual instances may have more impact. So when you're on forums, or writing press releases, or chattering on Twitter, think about how you might word things to establish yourself as a 'brand' of your particular generic product. For example, instead of referring to this as "our blog", we should refer to it as the "BMON online marketing blog", to connect our brand "BMON" with the product "online marketing blog". Just get into the habit.

Your brand continues its inexorable rise to the top

If you want to know what one of these is, and how to create one, let me push you in the direction of the robots.txt Tutorial on SEObook, which should tell you far more thanyou ever need to know. If you don't have a robots.txt file, it's time to ask your web designer why not.

Keep the robots happy

Gracias Knol