Have Title Tags Changed After Hummingbird?

[netviper]

Now that Hummingbird is really looking at longer-tail searches and almost a Q&A style search, should the way we do our title tags change?

Moz still recommends:

Optimal Format

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

But is this really right anymore after Hummingbird? Should we be more of a Q&A type title tag, while still using our Primary Keyword?

For example:  If I am targeting Red Nike Shoes, should my title tag be:

Red Nike Shoes, Nike Shoes | Shoes.com

or now:

We carry the latest Red Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or

Find Red Nike Shoes on sale at shoes.com

What are your thoughts?

[crackingmedia]

Hi Dave

I really don't think the optimisation of Title tags post-Hummingbird changes very much if any at all.

Google continue to use the Title tag (up to about 70 characters) as the link in SERPs and the Title tag is still an important factor for telling both human and search engine visitors what the page is about.

Apart from, perhaps, blog posts, where you might have a longer-tail title that reflects the subject of the post, e.g. "How Google is Changing Long-Tail Search with Efforts Like Hummingbird", a Title tag can be optimised in much the same way as before.

The importance with Hummingbird is focused on Google providing a more intelligent understanding of search requests which might be for a long-tail search request, but the intent of the user's search can still be boiled down to less words.

I recommend reading Ammon Johns recent blog post, "Hummingbird – The Opposite of Long-Tail Search" in which he talks about someone, sat in Denver on his mobile phone searching “Where’s a good place where I can get a pizza?”.

Google's analysis of that search is that they can work out the person is sat in Denver and it will work out that the connection between the words "place" and "pizza" means a restaurant. The short tail result for the intent of that search can be summed up in a Title tag of "Denver Pizza Restaurant".

So you could still use a short Title tag like that and it would work, as long as, of course, other on-page and off-page elements supported the relevancy of the page for the search as did the rest of the website.

Another great blog post recently was Gianluca Fiorelli's "Hummingbird Unleashed". In it he wrote one sentence which I found very helpful for understanding SEO for Hummingbird:

"We should stop focusing only on keyword optimization and start thinking about topical optimization."

I hope that helps,
Peter