Hello everyone, I wonder more and more the question of the effectiveness of a list of three to four keywords in the TITLE tag. Would not it better to offer hooks / phrases for search engines? Example for a keyword such as "chocolate cake": <title> Chocolate Cakes - Chocolate Cakes Black </ title> or <title> How successful your cake and chocolate cake with dark chocolate </ title> Thank you for your opinion!
I choose 2nd version because SEO it`s for human also - so in title you have a small description about your product, but you have to include also few keywords but not : Chocolate Cakes - Cakes - Chocolate - Chocolate Cakes Black - Cake Black" or something like that.
Assuming that you want this page to rank for "chocolate cakes" and "dark chocolate cakes" then I would DEFINITELY vote for using keyword phrases instead of "tag lines" or VERY longtail phrases as you call them in the <title>. <title> is THE most important and most influential on-page ranking factor from an SEO perspective, so it's crucial IMO to optimize title tags/elements for search. If you want ANYTHING on your page optimized for your targeted keyword phrase, it's the <title> element. It's not even displayed on the web page itself... it's only shown in the title bar of the browser. So it's kind of hard to say it should be written for humans instead of search engines. Others will argue that it's shown in the SERPs, so it should be written for humans. But humans know that the <title> shown in the SERPs typically list the highlevel topic of the page (i.e. keyword phrases). It's been done LONG before people were worried about SEO or usability. Optimize your meta descriptions for humans. It is always displayed in the SERPs at some search engines and can be optimized so that it is frequently shown as the Google snippet if you know what you're doing. It's the snippet that can drive click-thru-rates for your organic SERP listings. Google and most search engines likely look at keyword density withing individual HTML elements that are themselves ranking factors like <title>, <h1>, <h2>, etc. They also look at the words at the begining of these HTML elements as being much more important than those closer to the end of the elements. They do this in much the same way as they look at keyword density of the content in the non-templated (body) portion of the page and consider content near the top of the page as more important than content near the bottom of the page... only on a more microcosmic level. When looking at density and position of content on a page, it likely has MUCH less of an effect on SEO than when search engines consider a particular HTML element that is a ranking factor like <title>... Here because their is SOOOOOO little data to evaluate, the affect of keyword density and position within the content of the element get magnified. This magnification will be applicable to all individual HTML elements considered ranking factors. The same applies to keywords in link text or anchor text of inbound links. Think about the two examples you gave... In example 1: NOTE: I changed "black" to dark because the phrase you're comparing the above to used dark chocolate. The title element has the following keyword densities: Chocolate 40% Cakes 40% Dark 20% Also keyword phrase positioning says, "The page is primarily about chocolate cakes, secondarily about dark chocolate cakes." Now look at the 2nd example you gave: The title element has the following keyword densities: cake 20% chocolate 20% dark 10% all other words 10% each and cake, dark, and chocolate appear between the middle and end of the phrase... Which do YOU think search engines are going to consider to be more about chocolate cakes or dark chocolate cakes? Actually I wouldn't use either... I would change the order of your 1st option to read Not only does it read better when users DO see it in the SERPs, but search engines will get exact matches in the title element for all of the following: or "chocolate cakes", "chocolate cakes dark", "cakes dark chocolate", and "dark chocolate cakes"... since hyphens are seen as word separators.