Fewer keywords in title tag?

[nyc-seo]

Hello,

I have a title tag that includes three keywords and has a total of 59 characters. The third keyword is not very important. If I eliminated the third keyword, leaving the first two (for a total of 48 characters), would the ranking value of the first two keywords increase? Does including the third keyword dilute the value of the first two?

Thank you!

[William.Lau]

Your keywords on your title tag is not that relevant in terms of ranking. Meta tags are generally used for SERP CTR. You just want to make sure when your site shows up on the search people will actually click to it. Putting multiple keywords don't help your rankings at all.

I suggest optimizing your title tag with the most helpful title for search users.

[TakeshiYoung]

The title tag is one of the most important on-page factors that Google looks at. Every keyword you have in your title dilutes the value of all the other keywords, so you should stick to as few words as possible, plus maybe your brand name. This is also a good practice from a user experience perspective.

[nyc-seo]

William,

I have to disagree with your answer. Title tags are very relevant to rankings. Here is a quote from SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag:

"Creating a descriptive, keyword-laden title tag is important for increasing rankings in search engines. The screen shot below comes from SEOmoz's survey of 37 influential thought leaders in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword usage in the title tag was the **most important **place to use keywords to achieve high rankings."

[nyc-seo]

Thank you, Takeshi!

[William.Lau]

I'm sorry I may have gotten it mixed up.

I was thinking of the meta name=title. From what I remember meta name=titles do little-to no affect in ranking. This is mainly because you can always override your with meta name=title in which a user can just easily manipulate the meta name=title to spam keywords, while could actually have nothing to do with the meta title. Thus there is little to no affect in rankings.