How to Write an SEO Title Comments Off
You could spend hundres of hours learning SEO, but learning “How to Write an SEO Title” for your pages is probably the most important thing that you could do. As I mentioned in the last post, google uses over 200 rankings signals to determine your fate in the results pages, but the one that is probably the heaviest weight of all is the title of your page. The “HTML title”.
This post contains information that you can use to SEO your title for any kind of web site, static HTML pages, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal – whatever you’ve got. I’m going to assume that whatever you have named the page in your web site software will become the HTML title. The HTML title is the tag in the head portion, it’s the text between the beginning and ending tags that say <title> and <title/>.
*Please note*: it DOES help if the URL of the page, the page heading AND the HTML title uses the same SEO keywords.
How the SEO title works
An HTML title should be 75 characters or less, because search crawlers generally won’t index more than that. Use the keywords that you think people will actually use in a Google search.
I’m naming this page “How to Write an SEO Title”, because that’s what I think people will search for to find this content. It could also be “Writing Effective SEO Titles”, “How the HTML title tag and SEO work”, etc. The important thing is that I have the keywords “SEO Title” in there with some natural language that’s relevant.
Why People Click Titles
The tricky thing is (that I hadn’t mentioned yet), you want your title to be SEO friendly and good for search engines, but you also want your title to be what they call “link bait”. In other words, use SEO words, but make the title something that people will actually want to click on. Entice them – make them think that if they don’t click they will be missing out. Don’t be spammy – but use a little marketing sense and optimize that title for both people and search engines
Original Content
I have 15 years experience working online, and in my experience Google is pretty good at figuring out you’re trying to get a good ranking. It knows the difference between making your title “SEO Title” and “My SEO Titles get 100X more clicks”. When your title contains more than just the keyword phrase alone with a little natural language, as long as your page content has strong original content – you stand a chance at getting a better ranking overall. When Google thinks that you’re writing good original content that people will want to read – you will be more successful every time!