"The first word of your title carries the most weight, so lead with the keyword."

"The first word of your title carries the most weight, so lead with the keyword."

Weak tea.

This comes from one Moz correlation note years ago suggesting keywords earlier in the title correlated with rankings. Correlation, small effect, repeated until it became a commandment.

Here's what actually happens: there is no documented Google mechanism that weights word position inside a title tag by proximity to the start. The retrieval system reads the whole title as a field. What earlier placement actually buys you is human: the keyword survives truncation and is visible before the user's eye drifts.

So the advice isn't wrong, it's mislabeled. "Front-load so it doesn't get cut off and the click target is obvious" is real. "The algorithm scores position-one heavier" is a folk theory.

Lead with the keyword for the reader, not because byte offset zero is sacred.