Google: Keyword-Heavy Titles Not Against Our Guidelines via @MattGSouthern

That’s not to say Google recommends this practice either, as filling the title and description with keywords can make it more difficult to understand what the page is actually relevant for.

Mueller says the biggest improvement a site could hope to see by rewriting those titles and descriptions is a better click-through rate. He repeatedly recommends writing better meta tags to improve CTR, but never suggests doing so to improve rankings.

Here’s what he says:

“It’s not against our webmaster guidelines. It’s not something that we would say is problematic. I think, at most, it’s something where you could improve things if you had a better fitting title because we understand the relevance a little bit better.

And I suspect the biggest improvement with a title in that regard there is if you can create a title that matches what the user is actually looking for then it’s a little bit easier for them to actually click on a search result because they think “oh this really matches what I was looking for.”

Whereas if you were looking for “flower delivery Brighton” and as a title in the search results you see “flowers, green flowers, yellow flowers, Brighton…” and all of the cities nearby. You might look at that and say: well is this some SEO result? Or is this actually a business that will do a good job and create some nice flowers for me?”

So that’s something where I almost think it’s a matter of improving the click-through rate rather than improving the ranking. And if, with the same ranking, you get a higher click-through rate because people recognize your site as being more relevant then that’s kind of a good thing.”