: Does the order of keywords matter in a page title? Stack Overflow has made a change to their page titles such that the most popular tag for a question appears at the start of the title.

@Berumen354

Yes, it matters. For examples


search for buy apple iphone: See the result
2 links of Apple Iphone pages comes in which buy link comes first.


Now Just apple iphone



similarly you can experiment variations and see the results.

In my analysis, it depends upon positional strength. it is a complex formula. In summary, order of words in a query should be closest match in title,url and description.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Yeniel560

Yes, putting important keywords closer to the beginning of a title does help SEO. SEOmoz's ranking factors survey agrees, as do other sources.


Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance

Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance

Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
60% high importance

Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
49% moderate importance


Side rant: Personally I hate this because it actually devalues user experience in many cases. For home pages, if you are a company selling red widgets a spammy title like "red widgets, widgets, blue widgets" can be more successful that "Awesome WidCo plc - suppliers of red widgets".

I believe the site name should come first on the home page, but SEO forces you to do the opposite.

Vote Up Vote Down