How Do HTML Title Tags Affect SEO?
January 21st, 2007It 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”.
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!
For the search term “essential portable apps”
Before: Positioned 2nd of about 1,370,000 results
Now: Positioned 2nd of about 1,390,000 results
Result: Position unchanged
For the search term “remove popcorn”
Before: Positioned 3rd of about 1,140,000 results
Now: Positioned 5th of about 1,260,000 results
Result: Position down from 3rd to 5th
For the search term “Top Web Analytics Tools”
Before: Positioned 94th of about 18,100,000 results
Now: Positioned 280th of about 23,400,000 results
Result: Position down from 94th to 280th! Total indexed Web pages increased by about 30%.
Conclusion
My position went down for two of the three search terms. Especially the last one, from 94th to 280th! Not that 94th was any good to start with: ) The number of pages that Google has indexed on the Web has increased for all three search terms – as one would expect – and that may have an effect. It’s possible that my page rankings were affected simply because Google detected that the pages were modified. I’ve heard that old is good when it comes to search engines. If that is true then it’s possible their rankings will improve over time. For now I’ll hope so and I will be checking from time to time how they are doing. Either way I’m sticking with the new title format because it looks better. Blissful ignorance?