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A Good title for every article on your site is hugely important for driving long term search engine traffic.

It literally can be the difference between getting no visitors and getting thousands of visitors a month to individual articles.

If your site already has some love from Google (i.e. a decent amount of backlinks) then landing most of your articles in the top 10 of Google should come easily just through optimizing your titles.

If you don’t optimize your titles you are missing out on lots of regular traffic!

How To Create SEO Juicy Titles:

• Your page should be coded so that this title appears in the meta <title> tag and within a heading tag (h1, h2 or h3 etc.)
• Your meta title should not be automatically filled with a big long sentence from every page e.g having "May Site Name - My site is cool" at the end or beginning of every title like a lot of sites do.

Here is what I often tell my writers to do when creating a title for an article.

• Forget about catchy headlines for a minute
• Avoid stuffing it with lots of useless words like and, the, he, she etc.
  Think Keywords that people search for.
• Go for a mixture of longtail keywords.
• Make sure you get at least one strong keyword phrase at the very beginning of the title.

A Working Example of a Title

So let’s think of a theoretical article to try:

Let’s say we have written an article about a fixing your Cambridge Audio amplifier that doesn’t give off any sound.

Example of a bad title:

The easiest way to mend a broken amplifier in just 37 minutes

That sucks - most of the words are useless grammar type words, or words that people won’t search for like "easiest" or "minutes".

Example of a Good Title | How to do it…

Before you start the title think of some specific phrases for the article:

"Cambridge Audio Amplifier"
"Cambridge Audio Amp"
"Broken Amp"
"Fix Amp"
"Repair Amp"
"Broken Amplifier"
"Fix Amplifier"
"Repair Amplifier"
"Amp No Sound"
"Amplifier No Sound"

Now I want to cram as many of those into the title as I can - but also want to pick a strong phrase to put at the start of the title - I often find Google gives more weight to words at the beginning of a title than at the end (just personal experience talking here - not solid proof).

For my main phrase I will pick "Repair Cambridge Audio Amplifier"

So I would make something like this:

Repair Cambridge Audio Amplifier - Fix Broken Amp With No Sound

that’s a great title!

Look how many keywords I crammed in there! Even if someone searches for a phrase like "Cambridge Audio No Sound" I could still appear in the top 10 because the words are somewhere in the title - they don’t necessarily have to be in the right order (although it helps).

I could end up getting in the top 10 for any of these:

Cambridge Audio
Audio Amplifier
Repair Cambridge Audio Amplifier
Repair Cambridge Audio Amp
Cambridge Audio Amp
Cambridge Audio Amplifier
Broken Cambridge Audio Amplifier
Broken Cambridge Audio Amp
Broken Amp
Broken Amplifier
and so on….

Chances are I will get in the top 10 for some.

Using this method means you can almost always get in the top 10 with any article for at least some keyword phrases (providing your site has a decent amount of backlinks as a whole).

It’s one of the small changes that can make a BIG difference.

The more advanced trick is getting the keywords in there as well as creating a very attention grabbing title to get more clicks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 7:22 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.