optimising your title!

how commas work!

[soapystar]

can anyone tell me if the use of a comma to seperate phrases in a page head title say....

"nice neat title,small title"

means the two phrases nice neat title and small title score higher than if no comma was used ? ashtough it was written for the meta keywords!

[martinibuster]

One thing you can do is do an search on google, then see what the differences are. Like, "dog walker, cheap" then do "dog walker cheap" and see if the titles made any difference.

If I were to take a guess, I'd say it doesn't make a difference, because the search engines look at words, excluding stop words (and I would assume that punctuation would be a stop word, of sorts). That's my opinion based on reason, not any cold hard facts.

[Woz]

From what I have seen SEs tend to ignore punctuation altogether.

So searching for something like "about engineering" or "engineering resources" will often pickup pages who have the words in their navigation at the top of the page looking like:-

home ¦ about ¦ engineering ¦ resources ¦ contacts

or even a title such as

"About Engineering -¦- Resources for students!"

Having said that, although the SEs ignore punctuation, people do not, so it can be usefull in seperating phrases for the users eyes and perhaps gain the required response - a click!

Onya
Woz

[baldrix]

I work on the principle that punctuation is ignored, especially for KW phrases that don't easily fit into a sentence. For example, I optimise for the phrase 'villa florida' by using something like " - - -selecting your villa. Florida is one of - - - ". I have no proof that this always works, but it does seem to for me.

[WebGuerrilla]

No, this will not work, and in fact has the potential of hurting the performance of your titles.

Your example:

"nice neat title,small title"

That title will generate an exact match for both phrases with or without the comma, because you wrote it with no space after the comma. (which wouldn't be considered proper).

To a spider, nice neat small title is the same as nice,neat,small,title because both commas and spaces are treated as delimiters. Each word is separated by one space, so there are multiple possibilites for exact match combinations.

However, if you were to do something like nice neat, small titles you would loose the opportunity for the title to generate an exact match for the phrase neat small because you now have two spaces between the words.

[soapystar]

i see what you are saying about less variables for different matches..but in the case where a single phrase was targeted, say nice neat title, would

nice neat title, small title ......

rank any higher than

nice neat title,small title ?

[WebGuerrilla]

Both a comma and a space after the word title will be treated equal. No advantage either way.

[piskie]

Comma delimiters in a database context can mean end of field and may result in the portion of the title tag after the comma being ignored by spiders who are retrieving for database storage.

MHO but I may be wrong.