Title advice

How do the search engines like them to be?

[Small Website Guy]

Suppose I desire for my page to show up when someone does the search "Keyword1 Keyword1".

My titles currently read: "WebSiteName - BogusWord1 preposition Keyword1 Keyword2 BogusWord2"

If I changed the titles to read: "KeyWord1 Keyword2 BogusWord2 - Bogusword1 preposition WebSiteName", thus placing the keywords at the beginning, would that make the search engines like my pages better? (It would make it uglier for humans, but I guess that's the price to pay for good search engine placement.)

The BogusWords and the prepositions in the titles are for the human web surfer and not the search engine spiders.

[Mohamed_E]

SWG,

Welcome to the basic dilema of designing titles.

Your title plays two very different roles in your strategy:

1. It is the first impression a searcher gets of your site in the SERPs before even clicking on the link. Readability is key here, and an illiterate sounding title can easily drive me, at least, to click elsewhere.
   
2. It also plays a vital role in your placement in the SERPs. No point having a perfectly readable title if the searcher has clicked elsewhere before even reaching it!
   

Balancing these two is a difficult art, trial and error, and multiple rewrites, usually lead to a reasonable compromise.

[Small Website Guy]

Thanks for the reply. But is it true that placing "kewyord1 keyword2" as the first two words of a title is better (for placement in search engine results) than placing them in the middle?

How much of a difference does it make?

I realized my initial mistake of having the same title on every page of my site, so I redesigned it so that each page has different keywords in the title.

But I wonder if I could make it even MORE search engine friendly by putting the most important words first.

Or what if I took out everything EXCEPT the keywords? Would that be even better? How much better?

It's too bad the search engines prefer spammy keyword titles over nice human readable ones.