Want People To Read Your Articles?
The title is the first thing that someone will usually use to determine if the rest of the article is worth reading. Titles should do the following things:
Regarding Marketing, What Should A Title Do?
- Provide a Clear Benefit
- Solve a Problem Quickly
- Describe what the article is about
- Be short and to the point
- Get the User to Read the Rest of the Article
- Usually, titles are title cased too, first letter of each word in caps
- Do not exaggerate the truth, it must be believable
Regarding Search Engines, What Should A Title Do?
Search engines also use titles to rank articles. Titles are one of the most important parts of your web page! Here are some quick rules when writing titles for your pages:
- Titles MUST be unique for every page, 2 pages with the same title will be penalized
- Titles MUST contain the keyphrase that the article is about
- Titles should be less than 72 characters, or less than 60 if possible.
Examples of Good MARKETING Titles
By combining these simple rules you can come up with some good titles. Here is a list of good titles:
- House Train Your Dog in 15 Minutes!
- Lose 5 Pounds Per Week Safely
- Don't Rent Another Video until you Read this!
- Free Lessons on Speed Reading, only 5 Minutes per Day!
- Enter to Win a Free Guitar
- Can you Win 75 out of 100?
- Have you Ever Seen Something So Funny?
- Top 10 Marketing Secrets, Can you Guess?
- I'll Show you How to Make $500/Week, Partime
All of the titles above solved a problem or offered something of interest without imposing huge restrictions on the reader. These are all great marketing headers, but some are good for search engines, and others are not. Can you guess which work well in search engines?
Search engines need to have the keyword. So any of the above titles that do not have a keyword in them, are not good for search engines, even though they may be great for traditional print.
Examples of Good Search Engine Titles
There are more rules to follow for the search engines, but the basic principle is the same.
- Letter Writing Tips: Effective Titles
- Keyword Tips: Free Search Engine Traffic
- Persuasive Writing: Hypnotic Titles
- Top 10 Myths about Meta Tags Tools
- How to Use Ezine Advertising
If you were to research the word counts on the above terms you would notice that the lowest word count "meta tag tools" was searched for almost 4,000 times last month, and the highest, "letter writing" was searched for 17,000 times. These numbers tell me that people will be looking for articles just like the ones above.
At first, I chose "marketing writing" but there were less than 800 searches for that term, and "metatags" had so few searches that it didn't even register. Effective titles are critical in your search engine pages. Try to think what people will type and what problems you can solve.
How do Search Engines Use Titles?
Here is a picture showing the search results for Barney Rubble. Notice that the top positions all have the term in their title. The title is the blue link that you would click on. The black text underneath is the description. Notice that both the title and descriptions contain the term "barney rubble"!
What about Sub headers?
Subheaders are used to break up text, making it easier to read. Typically a user will scan the sections that interest them and ignore the other sections. You make their job easier, and your document seem less daunting by using subheaders. Subheaders are a special html tag. The same principals apply to subheaders as to titles, but subheaders are usually more blunt.
Sub headers are also used to determine keyword weight, so it is a good idea to load keywords into subheaders as long as it doesn't break the flow of the document.