Relevance of the title tags is about 34% in the Google Ranking Algorithm in 2007.
I am doing a study to quantify the relevance of title tags and how it effects the Google Search results Ranking. I have hypothesized that the relevance rating of the title tags could be related by:
Relevance Rating = Presence of Exact Phrase in Title Tags/ Prominence of the phrase in the title tags
A. Presence of Exact Phrase in Title Tags Rating System:
100- if contains the exact phrase (Example: if the query is “Inbound Links”, if there is “Inbound links” in title tag, the score is 100)
50-if contains the opposite phrase (Example: if the query is “Inbound Links”, but title tag as “Inbound Link”, score is 50)
ten - if contains at least one word in the phrase (Example: if the query is “Inbound Links”, but only “Link” or “Links” in the title, score is 10)
1- if contains no match words of the queried phrase (Example: if query is “Inbound Links”, but no word “Inbound” or “Links” in the title tags, score is 1)
B. Prominence of the phrase in the title tags Rating
Prominence Rating= Position of the phrase in the title tags /Number of words in title tags
The experiment conditions are below:
Keyphases investigated:
1st replication: Inbound Link
2nd replication: Link Popularity
Number of Search engine result positions sampled: 20 (Position one to Position 20)
Result:
The plot gives the results of the test using the equation. This means that the R squared or coefficient of determination in statistics is about 34%. In other words, search engine ranking will be effected by title tag relevance with an impact of 34%. According to Google they have 200 factors in their ranking algorithm. The remaining factors can be approximated to compose 66%. I have replicated this experiment twice. The plot is the average of the two replications.
What are the recommendations of this finding?
This study recommends the following:
1. Put the exact phrase or keywords in the title tags.If singular form is targeted, place the singular form.If plural form is targeted, place the plural form. If it contains the apostrophe, place an apostrophe. Exact form as what is type in the query.
2. Place the phrase or keywords in the beginning of the title tags.
3. Make the title tag descriptive as much as possible but not more than the allowable number of characters (65 characters is typical)
By following the recommendations, it gives higher relevancy of the title tags for the targeted keywords and results to ranking improvement in Google.
