Titles are the first thing many readers see of your blog posts, videos or other content. They’re used for search engine optimization (SEO), show up in search results, and are the only thing visible on many social networks and content sharing sites. So how should you write your titles? For people? For search engines? Or for Social Networks? Is it possible to write a good title for all of them?
If you want people to read your posts, you need to write catchy, easy to understand titles. This a bit of an art form and often a title is best-written after the content to more accurate portray the overall message. People tend to like titles (and posts) with “how-to” or “best of” or “# ways to”. People also like catchy titles that may be slightly amusing. Unfortunately, these titles aren’t always the best for search engines…
Search engines are looking for keywords in a title so they know how to categorize the content. Obviously they also take into account keywords in the content (among other things), but the title is important. It’s also what shows up in the search results (along with your page description), so the title needs to have both good keywords and accurately represent the content on the page. There are SEO tools that allow you to write a different page title (what shows up in results) than the title that shows up on the actual article. This is nice since it allows you to write a title for people that’s catchy, but still have a title for the page that is relevant for search engines.
For example, the title of this article is “Is it Possible to Write Good Titles for People, Search Engines & Social Networks?”, but I’m also using Scribe SEO (affiliate link) plugin to optimize the title and description for search engines. So the page title is “Writing Content Titles for SEO, Usability & Social Networks”. The page title is what will show up in search engine results pages and also what shows up on any social networks where this content is shared (unless manually changed by the sharer).
Social networks also use titles to display links to content – usually pulling whatever is set as the page title (which is not the same as the content title, or doesn’t have to be). This is where it can be detrimental to use a SEO tool to have a different page title than the content title. Good titles for social networks tend to be a combination of what’s good for people and what’s good for search engines. People who use social networks like to see catchy titles, but they may also use keywords for finding content (where the search engine title comes in).
Writing good titles tends to be a bit of a balancing act. Making sure a title is good for people, for search engines and for social network sharing can be challenging. Unfortunately, many page titles are written only for SEO and that’s what gets passed on to social networks. But that may change as social networks become more important places for sharing content (and for getting traffic to your site).
What do you think? How do you write your content titles? Do you have different titles for people and for SEO?
Technorati tags: usability, SEO, social networks, marketing, search engine optimization, business