SEO Vs. Branding is a marketing quandary that bigger companies will need to come to grips with on the Internet. Often companies will need to choose whether to promote their own brand name as their main keyword phrase or optimize for a more generic keyword phrase.

For example, one search engine report shows that 1.3 million visitors per month search for the keyword "Best Buy." This same report shows that the term "electronics" is searched for by 1.1 visitors per month. The clear choice in this situation is for Best Buy to optimize for own brand name first and the word "electronics" second.

But, take a competitor such as Fry's Electronics. Roughly 95,000 visitors search for the keyword "Fry's" each month, far short of those who search for "electronics". Does this mean Fry's Electronics should optimize for "electronics" first and Fry's second?

A search on Google for "electronics" will show that Best Buy does not show up in the first two pages. Fry's is on the third page. But let's take a further look to see who is in the number 1 position: Sony. And Samsung is a close second.

LG, with 12,7002 searches per month for the word "LG", has managed to grab the number one spot for its brand name and the generic word "electronics". A search of the LG homepage source code will reveal that this page is optimized for both word, "LG" and "electronics." By optimizing for both words LG has grabbed a lot of traffic neglected by Best Buy and perhaps even exceeds Best Buys traffic in doing this.

One more issue in branding is trademark violation. Courts have upheld that websites using another company's branded name in its meta tags is engaging in trademark violation. For example, a site about pets would be infringing if it put the name Best Buy in its meta tags in hopes of gaining traffic from this trademarked word. Big companies have to keep themselves from others stealing traffic that is legally theirs. These companies cannot however keep a general term such as "electronics" as that is fair game for all electronics companies.

So in order to generate the largest ROI, large companies need to optimize their websites both for their own brand names and for the generic, high-traffic keywords and keyword phrases appropriate to their sites. Otherwise, they are letting tons of online business just slip away.