Title Tag, Are the Keywords Plucked out of it?

[donford]

We are working on redoing our site and I read the article from rand about how to properly format title tags, here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page

He showed how he could take 6 keywords and use them all in the title tag:

The title Tag:
Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org

The keywords:
Ted Baker
Ted Baker London
Ted Baker Clothing
Ted Baker Mens
Ted Baker Mens Clothing
Ted Baker Mens Collection

So what I am wondering is the keyword Ted Baker Mens Collection actually getting found. In this case we are dealing with a contraction (men's) and a plural form of a keyword (collections).

Is it plucked out from the title tag above?
Like this? Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org

In his article he goes on to say the biggest mistake he sees is, unfortunately exactly the way our site was built 6 years ago. That is people doing this:

Ted Baker, Ted Baker London, Ted Baker Clothing, Ted Baker Men's Clothing, Ted Baker Clothing Collection - Buy Online Now at Manamialameseo.com

Our site does just that, while we are PR 4 and get decent traffic for the business we are in, we are doing a huge update with new pages, information, and most importantly trying to get all the SEO the best as possible.

I want to make sure before we make these what could be huge impact changes that search engines do in fact Pluck the keywords from the title tag, and they are not required to be together.

Thank you for any thoughts, answers and most importantly your time.

Example following this formula:

Our Top 3 Keywords:
Molded Rubber
Rubber Molding
Custom Molded Rubber

Our Old way:
Title: Custom Molded Rubber, Rubber Molding, Molded Rubber
The new way:
Title: Custom Molded Rubber - Molding Services | OurSite.com

[SimonCullum]

Hi There,

A good question.

**1)  **Your example for Ted Baker based on a similar Title structure for your own site:

Ted Baker, Ted Baker London, Ted Baker Clothing, Ted Baker Men's Clothing, Ted Baker Clothing Collection - Buy Online Now at Manamialameseo.com

This is not an ideal title, it is spammy with all those mentions of 'Ted Baker' within, is too long and is simply not necessary, it's not good for Search and also it's not that good for User Experience/Readability.

So it's best to avoid these types of Titles

2) Your example from the SEOmoz blog post that you linked to:

Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org

This is a much better Title structure; it starts off with the main keywords/keyword phrase (great for search) followed by a descriptive title element based on what that actual page in question provides.

NB. The Domain Name/Business Name at the end is usually unnecessary for pages other than the homepage, about us page and contact page. In this example, it seems to repeat the domain name, a waste of valuable space and simply doesn't need a repeat of the domain name. Other than that, it appears to be a great Title tag for what I imagine the page is about.

What this better Title example in 2) above is getting at is Symantec Search.  This can be two things:

i) Words that are closely related (Collection and Collections) (Clothes and Clothing) are assumed to be the same thing, so if the search phrase contains e.g. Clothes, relevant pages optimized for Clothing can be returned in search results.

ii) Where words in a title are taken to form the phrase being searched on, as per your suggested example in your question (Ted Baker Mens Collection). The words don't have to appear in order, if they are close together, that can be good enough, so with a great Title, you'll be catering for many different versions of a similar search.

So to sum up, start replacing your current Title structure with the structure in that Blog Post (it's an old blog post, though still spot-on today) and in your question (and 2) in this answer).  From your question, it seems that you suspected this to be the better option of the two, which is most certainly is.

So that's an example structure of:

**Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008  **

as your new structure, for appropriate pages, without the domain/business name at the end for most pages.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon