Hacker News Reader

Comment by burriko | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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

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 :)

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.

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"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com