I have a few questions....

1) Does it help to add "keyword" phrases in your Website title?

2) Does it matter how the keywords are organized? (From 1st-last).

Originally posted by Synthetic
1) Does it help to add "keyword" phrases in your Website title?
2) Does it matter how the keywords are organized? (From 1st-last). 1)Usually.
2) Probably not.

Having key phrases in your page title is currently very important to most, if not all, the search engines -- so "usually" might even be understating it. But I've never seen any evidence that the order of the words in the title means much, if anything.

Word placement within the body text, though, is important to some of the search engines. Try to get your key phrases near the beginning of your copy.

Originally posted by Synthetic
I have a few questions....

1) Does it help to add "keyword" phrases in your Website title?

2) Does it matter how the keywords are organized? (From 1st-last).


Try this:

http://spider-food.net/meta-tags.html

The whole site, especially forums, is great reading if you're interested in SE optimisation.

Rgds

Originally posted by steve
Try this:

http://spider-food.net/meta-tags.html
Of course, the title of this thread notwithstanding, Synthetic's question really had nothing to do with meta tags. So perhaps a more relevant place to start would be:

http://spider-food.net/titles.html

It is a good, informative, site. And of course this page will tell you that placement order in the page title is important. What I said in my post is that I've never, in three years of doing SEO, seen any evidence that it's significant. I'd rather title the page in such a way that the key phrase is certainly there, but that the title reads well for the human audience that will be picking the page out of the list presented by the search engine.

Keywords and phrases SHOULD be included in your title, the most important keywords being included in the title of the index page of your site, since this is the primary listing your site will get.

In my experience it does matter what order you place the keywords into your title though.

Just as an example, go to Google and do a serach for a three word phrase, for example "computer graphics software"
http://www.google.com/search?q=computer+graphics+software

Now in a new window, do another search, this time for "graphics computer software"
http://www.google.com/search?q=graphics+computer+software

The results are different. But the question I would ask you is which of those two would you have been more likely to search on if you were looking at the subject I mentioned. Most likely the first, since it is logical English. Now if you look at the results, barring any paid listings, you will notice that the words appear in order as you searched them, so order IS important but it only relates, as with any search, to the specific search that is undertaken. So if you are looking to optimise to any degree, you need to prioritse your words and phrases, remeber the less words in a phrase the harder it will be to get the top positions, and then structure them into a logical readable and possible search phrase.

The words don't have to appear next to each other in the order but they do need to appear in the line in order.


One last gem, is that if you are getting into relatively high positions, eg teens to 30's, you would have been getting even higher results had you had one or more of your keywords in your domain name.

Originally posted by siwatts
Keywords and phrases SHOULD be included in your title, the most important keywords being included in the title of the index page of your site, since this is the primary listing your site will get.On some search engines. Some will index each page individually and not give any special treatment to the index page, which means you can optimize each page for a slightly different key phrase.


[comparison using different word order]
The results are different. A bit of misdirection, since of course there are other differences in the pages than just the page titles. And in fact in one of your examples the top-rated page has the page title "Untitled Document;" in the other example that page is returned in the number two position. Clearly the page title wasn't playing a very big role in the ranking.

Those examples, the first few returns, are returned from Google's directory and thus are listed with a "Category:" footer. But even the first "normal" return on your search for "graphics computer software" is a page with the order in the title being "computer graphics." The first page with words in the title being in the same order as in the search phrase comes halfway through the second page of returned sites.

Word order and placement in the body text is given much more weight than that of the title, as your examples illustrate.

[Sorry, hit "quote" instead of "edit."

If a mod happens by and can delete this, thanks.]

Thanks for the help everyone... I've certainly gained alot more knowledge in this area.

- Does anyone know of a Website where I can enter my site's URL, and it'll show information on how well my site is doing in search engine rankings?

Also, is it worthwhile purchasing services like "Web Positioning Gold" and so on?

If you want to see where your site is listed for a given search you can try http://www.rankpilot.com but I wouldn't place too much belief in the positions it reports to you for all engines.

In terms of Web Position Gold, I don't have it, but I've heard very good things about it. In general any optimiser would tend to avoid any form of automated submission, because your link can end up in some very dodgy places for which the bigger engines may penalise, but up until recently I was using (I still do if no level of optimisation has been specified for a given site) Exploit submission wizard, which I have seen some quite good results and no apparent penalties. It's a hard one.

In reply to JayC on the subject of Keyword order, I picked a bad example to use to show! I know that most of the experiments done within my own area of building, do yield quite dramatically different results because of a much lesser number of paid inclusions in the engine. There will always be sites which appear to beat the system.

I don't think that anyone would tell you that you have to have all your keywords in your title, and yes words in the body of your page score highly, but in my opinion the title is still the biggest score after a domain match.

JayC I'm not trying to deliberately disagree with you, but I have seen evidence that the above can be true, and whilst ever there is an element of 'can be', it is worth spending the time to get it right.