Does the order of keywords matter in a page title?

Question

Stack Overflow has made a change to their page titles such that the most popular tag for a question appears at the start of the title. The change is being deployed across the network, so check out the page title for this question.

Compare the question title and the page title for this question:

Question title:

Is it safe to use ASP.NET MVC3 RC?

Page title:

asp.net mvc - Is it safe to use ASP.NET MVC3 RC? - Stack Overflow

I understand the change to try and stop scrapers ranking higher on Google. Adding the most popular tag to the page title seems like a good idea.

However, a side effect that I'm noticing is that with a lot of tabs open, now the only part of the title that I can see is the tag. Would moving this keyword to later in the page title harm these efforts to improve SEO?

Possible title:

Is it safe to use ASP.NET MVC3 RC? - asp.net mvc - Stack Overflow

Solution 1

Yes, putting important keywords closer to the beginning of a title does help SEO. SEOmoz's ranking factors survey agrees, as do other sources.

Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance

Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance

Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
60% high importance

Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
49% moderate importance

Side rant: Personally I hate this because it actually devalues user experience in many cases. For home pages, if you are a company selling red widgets a spammy title like "red widgets, widgets, blue widgets" can be more successful that "Awesome WidCo plc - suppliers of red widgets".

I believe the site name should come first on the home page, but SEO forces you to do the opposite.

Solution 2

Yes, it matters. For examples

1. search for buy apple iphone: See the result 2 links of Apple Iphone pages comes in which buy link comes first.
   2. Now Just apple iphone

similarly you can experiment variations and see the results.

In my analysis, it depends upon positional strength. it is a complex formula. In summary, order of words in a query should be closest match in title,url and description.

Comments

[McDowell]

It might be a good idea to edit another example into this post, since the specific question cited isn't really valid any more -- it doesn't insert that tag in the title when the string already exists.

[Borzi]

@JeffAtwood is this logic case-insensitive?

[Kristian Damian]

I agree too and +1. A possible solution is "red widgets - Company Name", but I agree that i would prefer to see just the "Company Name" in Google results and NOT a bunch of identical titles "red widgets - company A", "red widgets - company B", "red widgets - company C". If you want to have fun search on Google for "Hotel Cattolica", look at page 2.

[Chris Adragna]

If you use FireFox, there are a number of Add-ons that provide various solutions, such as displaying the URL instead of the title or giving the tab two lines to display the text. Here's a URL that will show several options: addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/search/…

[Andy S]

Would it be possible to use a bit of JavaScript to move the tag from the beginning to the end of title? Or drop it altogether?

[Yahel]

Added a MSO to request that the tag be removed from the title using JavaScript. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71951/…

[Rafael Rivera]

What if you kept the title as suggested for SEO purposes, then "corrected" it via javascript for cosmetic reasons?

[Alex Poole]

Call me crazy, but won't the scrapers just do the same thing?

[Gerald]

+1 - Frustrating when search engine algorithms encourage sites to degrade general web experience

[McDowell]

@the they already did, and we didn't, which is why we had this problem in the first place.

[Chris Adragna]

How did this question get so many page views in one day -- far more than we usually see on Pro Webmasters?! (like by a magnitude of 10x)

[Sparr]

Someone should point out that the statistics here are from a poll of SEO professionals. These are NOT actually related to any specific real search engines at all.

[McDowell]

@sparr poll or not, the results of the poll match our practical, real world experience exactly. In fact the #1 item is the thing we changed before knowing about this poll, again, based on real world observation of results.

[Lèse majesté]

SEOmoz generally surveys the top professionals in the industry (e.g. guys from Distilled, the SEO for Microsoft, from SEOBook, etc.), so you can count on the participant consensus to be pretty close to how things work in real-life--otherwise they wouldn't be the top professionals in the industry. These are also less likely to be the blackhat SEO companies (though SEOBook does endorse some blackhat techniques) that believe in microoptimization voodoo.

[MrG]

@Chris Adragna - it was most likely a featured question, hit the "stack exchange" drop down at the top left of the page.

[Jonik]

@Chris, @MrG: No, it's mostly because Jeff tweeted about this (and he's got quite many followers on Twitter).

[Sparr]

@Lèse you can count on the participant consensus to be pretty close to a subset of how things worked in real life six months ago. Both of the changes I made to that sentence are important.

[dave1010]

You could sneakily use JavaScript to put the title back so it's better for the users again.

[DisgruntledGoat]

@dave1010: That veers into the realm of "Blackhat SEO" and in theory Stack Overflow could get penalized again. Pretty much what I was getting at in my answer - the best title for search engines is often not the best title for users. (Though I believe someone on Meta SO created a User Javascript to fix it, so have a look for that.)

[Joey]

@JeffAtwood: I always wanted to know how StackOverflow ranks so high in the search results..

[Roger Dahl]

Can't SE just put the tags in the title for spiders and leave it as is for browsers? Or is that not politically correct?

[Andrew Lott]

I wonder how accurate this answer still is. Hummingbird would seem to make this irrelevant.

[Damith Ruwan]

What a example....

[Lawyerson]

If you include an application-name meta tag on your page, Google automatically prepends it to the title of your homepage in its search results, while also trimming it from the end if necessary. This way you can optimize your homepage for ranking and still get a title that visually makes sense.