And the Perfect Title Tag is…
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Thanks to Michael (Graywolf) for his exceptional effort to bring us the answer to a vexing question – what is the “best” possible title tag:
From his research, it’s – “keyword phrase” : site title
That would have been my guess as well, but I’m glad to see it confirmed (with some wiggle room). Of course, the SEs could always change the algo on us, but this format makes the best sense – it tells you what the page is about and who’s bringing it to you – the exact format a human could get the best data from.
Sorvoja
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:11 pm
I agree.
sufyaaan
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:11 pm
I agree.
jestep
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 pm
I have been using a similar setup for a while now, and I agree that it is the best. The site title is also important for branding/recognition purposes.
Michael Martinez
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 pm
It’s good that he is sharing the results of his experiments but his test data sets are too small. And he doesn’t take into consideration all the variables that, even with the limited scope of his tests, may (for all we know) affect rankings.
For example, in his outbound links test, he looks at which page ranks first. Well, the pages are ranked on the basis of the relevance determination, but what is the relevance algorithm looking at? No one has ever even attempted to define it, so far as I know:
http://www.wolf-howl.com/?p=38
File 3 has less on-page content than File 4. Does File 4′s longer content somehow make it seem less likely to be important and relevant with respect to the search expression? (Keyword density advocates would say this test supports their position.)
And File 4′s text ends in the middle of a sentence. Does Google take completion of punctuation into consideration when determining relevance? After all, a fragmentary text may be less important than a whole text.
How is the Webmaster to know? Michael is right to invite other people to perform similar tests. I would expect a variety of results from such test, as each test will reflect the peculiar choices of its author, and the relevance weighting algorithm will focus on what it deems to be important.
Only with an aggregate summation of results can we hope to do any realistic analysis of what the search engine is doing.
Unfortunately, with the title tag test, the Google SERP link produces no results for me, so it’s impossible to analyze what he did. Larger test sets would, unless Google has targeted these experiments for filtering, survive the inevitable variations in Google’s SERPs better than a single set of four pages, each emphasizing a particular attribute.
Gladstein
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 pm
I assume “perfect” refers only to the best possible ranking, and that clickthroughs or conversions weren’t part of the experiment.
While the winning setup is the one I tend to use more often than not, I think it depends on the competition, how many kw phrases you want to get into the title, and whether the particular site’s needs put branding over ranking or vice-versa. That is, there will be times when you’re better off putting the company name first.
earlpearl
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Michael beat me to the punch. I agree with Michael. This is a valuable test…but I think it should only be taken within its framework. It is an experiment that tests for this element of ranking for sites with virtually no other potential impacts from the complex google algos.
Does that pattern hold when there are competitive levels of other sites competing for the same keywords. At what point do other aspects of the algos kick in.
I also have seen well ranking sites for virtually no competition for keywords. At some point though other factors kick in. Do these conclusions hold at higher levels of competition? That is something we may not know. As the many factors kick in…only those that hold the complex google formula really know.
Regardless, thanks for sharing the results.
Dave
Zodiac Signs Traits
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:20 am
yes this is really good, title tag is very important in front of search engine, i think he should define how to use keywords in title