How Do HTML Title Tags Affect SEO?

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

It is said that title tags are one of the most important of the on-page factors for SEO. So I put it to the test. A couple of weeks ago I implemented the SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress which updated the HTML titles of my pages to be “more SEO friendly”.

google_serp.gif

The idea was to give keywords more importance in title tags by placing them first, e.g. a page formerly titled “Da Vinci Planet ›› Blog Archive ›› Essential Portable Apps” is now titled “Essential Portable Apps | Da Vinci Planet“. Google’s search results pages have since updated and are now showing the “SEO friendly” page titles. The results are somewhat surprising! (more…)

 

Demystifying the Google ranking algorithm

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Google is very secretive about how their page ranking system works and to be fair it is probably very, very complex and best left a secret. The reason is that they are applying artificial intelligence to correctly weigh pages as if humans were ranking them. However, SEO specialists are providing more and more clarity on how to optimize sites. According to this site there are “over 100 SEO factors” that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). He created a very detailed and actionable SEO checklist with alleged positives and negatives for Google page ranking factors.