Proof of how important website titles are for SEO | Hacker News Reader

Proof of how important website titles are for SEO

wingify.com

43 pointsparaschopra25 comments

That exact phrase is also in the first paragraph, the page heading, and in the url. The conclusion that it's the page title that has caused it to rank so well doesn't seem accurate. If anything I'd say that it's a combination of the exact phrase being in all 4 places.

True. But titles do have significant influence in ranking. You may not always have flexibility to tweak your site URL, title, etc. for specific phrases but tweaking titles is a relatively easier way to hope to get ranked.

I think the important point is that people are discussing the evidence for this rather than merely stating it to be the case.

I'm also fairly certain there's a recency effect in play as well.

Probably true. That blog post is #4 right now.

Not to mention visualwebsiteoptimizer.com has a pagerank of 4.

Well, I did mention this:

"My guess is that Google is factoring in high page rank of the blog and then if title matches it ranks the post highly"

But I'd still maintain title is important. For example, our homepage http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ is ranked #2 or #3 for terms 'a/b testing software', 'a/b testing tool'. If title would have been just Visual Website Optimizer, do you think we would have ranked for those terms?

Absolutely, but it's just one piece of a bigger SEO puzzle. The more pieces you figure out, the higher you'll rank.

I really just wanted to point out that the article wasn't 'Proof of how important website titles are for SEO', as there are other elements on that page that could have been just as responsible for the ranking.

Sure, point taken :)

This is absolutely due to the freshness of the post. In fact, it’s already at spot #4 in my results. It is common knowledge that Google pushes up recent posts and slowly sinks them to where they belong after some time.

Can't it also be the case that in last 24 hours many more posts/webpages have come onto the web competing for the same phrase. (Especially since Christmas is near)

Did he turn off personalized search with the pws=0 parameter?

Great tip, I didn't know about this trick and had always just used incognito to do this.

It's surprising that such a baseless article is coming from an A/B testing tool provider.

Your article is talking about correlation, not causation. Where's the 'proof'?

I'd say you're just trying to milk the controversy around John's article. Nothing wrong in that had you provided an insightful article.

Correlation happens when two events can occur independently. In this case, Google would have never ranked the blog post had I not _written_ the blog post.

But I agree that it is not blog post contains a scientific proof. Sorry if you thought the title sounded like it did.

It is really frustrating to me that so few rely on their common sense with this topic. As a single page can only have one title, and it is the clearest indicator of what the page is about (it is the TITLE), of course it is important. It is also the main determinant of whether someone will click on your search result after, of course, rank.

But we're also talking about "onpage SEO" here, which is like 1/1000th of what determines if you will have a successful website in search engines (and even less for a successful website, period). You should know the basics, then worry far more about the quantity and quality of links to your pages... and lots of other stuff.

It's notable that 'free' and 'free gift' are alleged "stop words", too. I've seen a lot of confusion about that concept in certain communities; some people think that merely including "stop words" will cause serious dinging in search rankings.

Free or free gift is not stop words. "a", "the", "or" are stop words. And any way I don't think this is relevant to ranking of the post.

I think we're talking about different concepts, and yes, inclusion of these words does not appear to have been a factor. What I'm referring to is a belief held by some that words such as 'free' ae interpreted by google as meaning the page is lower quality content, spammy in some way, and is this results in demotion.

that's not what stop words are. Search on google for a definition.

Alt title: Proof of how unimportant "SEO experts" are to the web.

I would imagine that the search volume of this exact keyphrase is pretty low, even this time of year. So, not much competition, and not much benefit for winning.

This should be really, really obvious stuff for pretty much anyone who reads HN.

It's a reaction to a post on Daring Fireball earlier this week:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/title_junk

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