Relevance of the Order of objects in a dynamic title?

Newbie Joined: Nov 26, 2007 Posts: 22

I turned dynamic titles on in my new installation of RavenNuke (which has been very cool so far..)

I noticed that the title order didn't at first make sense to me. The site name is always at the end of the title unless there is nothing to go before it. I personally don't like that because when I bookmark a page, I don't like not having the site name as the first word. Therefore, I tweaked the script to always place the sitename first. I was much happier (for about 10 minutes...)

Then, I started investigating SEO and found that maybe having the site name first might be a descent idea for those bookmarking the page, but not so good for SEO, since search engines use the title as the subject line of the results.

I expect I already know your answer (especially since you did write the script - I doubt the order of objects was some random decision) but I would like to know your opinion or your experience on if it matters what goes where in a title field when it comes to search engines.

Also, for the question above, does it matter how long the domain title is - in my case, it's one word and 7 characters long. I think that might make a difference compared to a lengthy site name.

I know I'm probably just being weird in wanting the site title first - I do personally prefer it, but I wouldn't do so to jeapordize SE rankings.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 926

Yes, it is for SEO reasons. Since it has to be one or the other, I had to choose. I describe the reasonings in this thread with warren-the-ape which might be of interest to you:

http://montegoscripts.com/ftopict-225.html

Newbie Joined: Nov 26, 2007 Posts: 22

That's a perfect explanation. I wish I would have drilled further into that post before asking the question myself.

I will be putting it back the way it was - actually, I'm just going to replace it with the 1.2 script and be done with it.

This, along with Shortlinks should make a huge difference to my site. (and so easy to implement (especially with RavenNuke))

Also, thanks for not throwing out the "search is your friend" reply.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 926

And, another very good resource, probably THE most important one IMO, is http://nukeSEO. Having a Google sitemap that is automatically adjusted as your content changes is, imo, the "game changer" in terms of SEO.

I use it on my site here and you can its non-google version of the sitemap here.