After spending countless hours researching and trying out SEO techniques, I decided it might be a good idea to share some of the experiments with everyone else. For this specific test, I wanted to know if changing a site title would have an impact on the search engine rankings. Although most SEO experts agreed that a good title would increase your CTR once in the listings, very few were confident in how big of an impact it would make on the rankings themselves.

Most importantly, I was trying to find out if putting your keyword first (instead of your site title) would make a difference. For example: Is “T35 Hosting – Free Web Hosting” worse than “Free Web Hosting – T35 Hosting”.

Although no experiment with search engines is ever perfect, I tried to put in some controls and changed nothing except the title for an entire 2 weeks. In addition I used two search engines (Google and Yahoo) for this experiment.

Yahoo with old title:

Rank #11

Yahoo with new title:

Rank #10

Google with old title:

Rank #90

Google with new title:

Rank #86

Surprisingly, the new title increased the search engine rankings (although only by a little) on both Google and Yahoo! Although I still think it’s better to have your site name first (for usability), the search engines apparently prefer your keyword first. In addition, click through rate on my listings also went up! There you have it folks — titles do make a difference. Although I don’t think a title will make or break your rankings, it’s a contributing factor (albeit a small one) on both Google and Yahoo.