Importance - meta title keyword

[BeckyKey]

HI

I want to find out how important people think it is to have the keyword as the first word in the meta title?

Is this something that would even make a difference?

[BradsDeals]

As others have said, maybe, maybe not.

In my vertical, if "Macy's coupons" is the keyword, then everyone in the field puts that first in the title tag because the conventional wisdom is that it's the optimal placement.

The problem with that strategy is that everyone's title tags are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Literally nothing in the column stands out from anything else. Blah.

When we added a dynamic count to our titles, eg. "7 Macy's Coupons", and wrote them so they remained keyword rich while also reading more naturally, we observed two important things:

1. Our rankings did not change at all.
2. CTR went up.

The working hypothesis is that the number helps us stand out and the natural structure is easier to read and digest. It's optimized for human eyeballs just as much as it's optimized for ranking.

That's just one example, of course, and I'm sure others can line up with examples where the slightest change to a title tag knocked them back to page 30. I'd recommend testing it out.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Becky,

My answer: Yes It makes a difference.

As Laura said, it's debatable. 
Personally I think that the meta title is a perfect place to place some keywords. Of course, don't be abusive.

Every time that im in keyword optimization debate, I ask everybody to be concious whether placing any keyword in some places, such as meta title, headings or meta descriptions have real meaning in the context.
I've seen many articles that have wrong semantics, just for having put the keyword there.

Be logical, be reasonible and think if you where a visitor (or the google bot): Would you consider apropiate in that text, the keyword?

Hope it helps.
GR.

[KevnJr]

Hi Becky,

I have tried it both ways with positive results. I prefer the Title to "flow" and not appear as KW stuffed. From day 1, my mentor taught me "The Click is more important than the Rank" but we all know we must have rank to get click...

I always try to write Titles, Desc and content in a reader friendly informative manner, which sometimes means going against popular recommendations.

Hope this helps

KJr

[LauraSultan]

That's certainly debatable, and I'm interested to see what others say as well. For a long time, the best practice has been to put the most important keywords toward the beginning of the title tag. However, in a recent Google Webmaster Tools hangout (17:38), John Mueller said just shuffling keywords around probably doesn't affect rankings. He says that it should essentially be the same if it's still the same keywords.

Now, you have to take what John Mueller says with a grain of salt, and he certainly wasn't definitive in his answer. My understanding of his answer is that the order of keywords in the title tag only makes a difference if all other factors are equal, but I'd like to see someone test that theory.

The fact that Google frequently changes the title tag based on the query suggests that the order of keywords is less important than it once was.