Optimize This Page Title - Great Page Titles, Short and Sweet
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Michael Nguyen, writing for Social Patterns, lists eleven rules for writing page titles. Aaron Wall also lists eleven, but they’re a slightly different set. Matt McGee, writing for Gooruze, lists six. Still, there are certain things that all three of them agree upon. Here they are, in no particular order.
First, keep it short. Search engines will show no more than 60 or 70 characters (including spaces) when they list your page in the SERPs. If you get any longer than that, they’ll cut it off.
Second, be accurate, relevant, and descriptive. Give both the search bot and the human searcher a good idea of what to expect of your page’s content. If possible, front-load your most important keyword, and avoid keyword stuffing.
Third, have a unique title for every page on your site. If you don’t, the search engines might think you’re displaying duplicate content, and that brings its own headaches. Your human visitors will also have a hard time telling the difference between your pages.
Fourth, write in plain English (or whatever language you’re using for your site’s content). Yes, it’s hard not to want to get fancy. As Graywolf pointed out in his SEO blog recently, “Spring Sunglass Trends in New York City” is simply not as entertaining a title as “Specs in the City.” And in that case, the title might work. But it’s too easy to get so clever that the meaning slips past your target audience. Remember, searchers aren’t reading page titles so much as skimming them, so you need to write a title that makes it clear from the get-go what the page is all about.
Fifth, don’t stuff your title with keywords. One at the beginning is fine. Likewise, don’t add unneeded words to your title. You might be surprised by how much you can cut. Nguyen used the following example: “Click here to go to my page” could be cut to simply “my page.”
Sixth, here’s a direct quote from Aaron Wall to give you a good idea of what a page title should do: “Good titles evoke an emotional response, ask a question, or promise something (that the landing page fulfills).”
Next: What about Article Titles? >>
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