Role of Keywords in Title

[ShaneHunter]

Hey Guys!

First thread... I heard through a few associates that this is the place to be for aspiring seo's.

My question to you, the super-pro's is:

How big of a role, in your experience, have you found keywords to play in SERP's?

For example, I'm trying to rank for "San Diego SEO"

My website is www.san-diego-seo.org

A secondary question, how big of a detriment are the dashes in my url to SERP's?

[Tiggerito]

Dashes may even help your URL as it helps the search engines (and people) determine what the keywords are.

A good example is "Experts Exchange" which could have been interpreted as "Expert sEx change" if they didn't have dashes in their domain.

And I find keywords in the title do have a large effect. Don't spam though. Remember your title is shown in search results and so should be attractive to people.

[Tiggerito]

Dashes may even help your URL as it helps the search engines (and people) determine what the keywords are.

A good example is "Experts Exchange" which could have been interpreted as "Expert sEx change" if they didn't have dashes in their domain.

And I find keywords in the title do have a large effect. Don't spam though. Remember your title is shown in search results and so should be attractive to people.

I just came over this Matt Cutts video that he not only talks about using dashes, but he uses the "Experts Exchange" example!

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/

[janeth]

Evil Red Monkey is #1 IceGal #2

[mjtaylor]

Evil Red Monkey is #1 IceGal #2

I think that is very interesting .... and I also wonder: since the title of evilrendmonkey.com has other colors in it .. could Google not see 'colors' as semantically related? What if the content was the same on both of them and all that was varied was the title tag and the domain? Doesn't everything else have to be equal to make the experiment accurate? What if you remove the text at the bottom with the domain name in it? That is content ... or added one instance of 'evilredmonkey.com' to icegal. Also, there are links from this thread to evilredmonkey ... which would sully the results, wouldn't it? I have removed those now, but it may be a long time before Google removes those links from its index.

I do recognize that the added benefit of having keywords in one's domain means that links to the domain will help in the SERPs, but if we are debating whether Google ranks the title more highly than a keyword in a domain, then I think the test has to be to sites without any backlinks, and evilredmonkey had two from this forum.

[kgun]

Doesn't everything else have to be equal to make the experiment accurate?

Usually, in scientific experiments that is true.

Do you think it would be possible to rank above amazon even if you bombareded your site with those keywords? Is there a difference between long and short run effects? What would happen when GoogeBot found that there is a domain http://evilredmonkey.com/ ?

[Webnauts]

but if we are debating whether Google ranks the title more highly than a keyword in a domain, then I think the test has to be to sites without any backlinks, and evilredmonkey had two from this forum.

Very good point MJ!

[morestar]

I think that is very interesting .... and I also wonder: since the title of evilrendmonkey.com has other colors in it .. could Google not see 'colors' as semantically related? What if the content was the same on both of them and all that was varied was the title tag and the domain? Doesn't everything else have to be equal to make the experiment accurate? What if you remove the text at the bottom with the domain name in it? That is content ... or added one instance of 'evilredmonkey.com' to icegal. Also, there are links from this thread to evilredmonkey ... which would sully the results, wouldn't it? I have removed those now, but it may be a long time before Google removes those links from its index. .

This is very true. I didn't go farther than looking at the rankings but were both sites identical? Well no. I think the test would have been more accurate if both sites where idential, both without the keywords "evil red monkey" anywhere on any page accept for in the title of icegals and both having different versions of Lorem Ipsum on the page so both sites wouldn't have duplicate text.

Nice looking icegal I must say though...

Janeth we might have to revise the test !

[goldsteinmedia]

Dashes may even help your URL as it helps the search engines (and people) determine what the keywords are.

A good example is "Experts Exchange" which could have been interpreted as "Expert sEx change" if they didn't have dashes in their domain.

And I find keywords in the title do have a large effect. Don't spam though. Remember your title is shown in search results and so should be attractive to people.

I totally agree. Make sure you use dashes and not _ under scores.

[digital29]

Keywords in the title are very important, but keywords in the url/domain are way more important. If they are long tail or not so competitive, you could get nr.1 for a keyword that is included in the domain without doing anything