Facing traffic troubles? Did you know that you can improve your search engine traffic just by making some simple changes to your title of the article? Did you know that using an attractive seo title could increase clickthrough rate i.e. more and more people checking out your page?
There are two parts of creating an effective title for your web page and blog titles: search engine optimization and link baiting.
With these two elements, your pages will both rank well within search engines and increase click through which equals even more traffic.
In this article, you’re going to learn how to craft search engine optimized titles that gain clicks.
1. Research The RIGHT Keywords
Keywords are important; Really Important.
To be effective with search engine optimization, you will need to choose the correct keywords that web users are searching for – not simply picking randomly.
Using the right keyword will make all the difference for your search results.
To find your keywords, you will need to use right tools. Not just any tool, you need powerful keyword tools.
The three most helpful tools to find keywords for search engine optimization are:
Whichever you choose, you will be able to see exactly what users are searching on with their preferred search engine.
Simply plug in your keyword and you’ll be given a list of keywords and phrases related to your query. These are the keywords you want to use for your search engine optimized titles.
2. Research Your Competition
Competition can be fierce depending on what keyword you’re aiming for. For this reason, the easiest path to gain high search engine rankings with keywords is to target the long-tail keyword.
The long-tail pertains to keyword phrases rather than single keywords.
Even though a single keyword may receive millions of searches, the amount of competition and marketing capabilities of competitors will make it nearly impossible to rank for your single keyword.
Instead, look for phrases which users are searching on. Instead of “shoes”, go for phrases such as “blue jogging shoes for women”.
Yes, these phrases have fewer searches overall but it will be much easier to reach top ranks once your titles are optimized.
Additionally, users which search using long-tail keyword phrases are more likely to convert into customers or subscribers.
After you’ve determined your long-tail keywords, use plugins such as the SEO plugin for Firefox to view backlinks, page rank and site value. If a page has only a few backlinks and low page rank, you have a much easier chance to rank high using your search engine optimized title.
3. Increase Your Clickthrough Using Linkbait
Link bait doesn’t necessarily mean tricking users by creating deceitful page titles.
Instead, linkbait refers to crafting both search engine optimized titles which also entice users to click by presenting a clear value.
Quickly think this over, what would you click:
- Blue Women’s Jogging Shoes | ExampleShoeCompany.com
- The 10 Best Blue Jogging Shoes For Women
The difference is obvious – the second title gives the users plenty of information up front about what the article is about but has its own opinion by including ‘best’.
People love top 10, resources, how-to’s and other forms of highly informational posts. These types of posts create great linkbait which increases the clickthrough.
So if you create an search engine friendly title that ranks well, you should also make it a clear point to create a title people want to click on otherwise your efforts are voided.
Do read 5 Killer Secrets To Writing Magnetic Titles that will help you in this technique.
4. Search Engine Optimized Titles: Best Practice
Although it’s subjective to your website, there are a few formulas that work well when crafting search engine optimized titles.
Here are a few formulas:
- Keyword + Phrase
- Keyword Phrase | Website Name
- Website Name | Keyword Phrase
One of the best ways to optimize your titles is to place the keyword at the front of your title giving the search engine spiders a clear idea of what the article is about and what keywords you’re going after.
Bring It All Together
By combining search engine optimized keywords and linkbait style titles, you will see an increase in both search engine rank and clickthrough with each of your pages.
The higher you rank and better your clickthrough, the better amount of traffic you will generate with each of your pages.
Keep each of these tips and suggestions in mind next time you create a new article, web page or blog post and you’ll see search engine success beyond what you’ll ever imagine.
Do let me know what technique YOU are utilizing to increase clickthrough rate from search engines. This would help us learn from your experience. So please use the comment form below to share your ideas and thoughts.
sorry Sushant, just to make things clear,
we should pick a long tail keyword with a lower search volume + lower competition. is that it ?
if that’s the case, i might need to reDO it all over again.
Thanks
Long tail keyword with low search volume and low competition are easier to rank because just by doing on-page optimization and a little bookmarking could help you get first page rankings.
For example, let’s take a long tail keyword “how to speed up wordpress blog”
My blog is ranking on first page of Google because it has low search volume and also not people are doing special link building for this keyword and even I didn’t did anything special. So it’s easy to get ranked for it just by doing on-page optimization and a little social bookmarking.
Shah, think about things this way. If you write an article about exercise using a keyword or key phrase that has 300 million results, what are the chances of anyone ever seeing your blog post in the organic results? Your site and post would need to take over other blogs and websites that have been around for a lot of times a decade or more and sites that are very well ranked and respected. Then look at using long tail key phrases…yes, less people will search for them, BUT, the people that search for longer phrases do so with a mission- they are already interested in the phrase they typed in and they either want information or want to buy a product. It is also easier to land on page 1 of the search engines. If 30,000 people a month search for a long phrase that has 5 million organic results, that is a much easier market to dominate than a niche where 1 million searches are done per month, but there are 300 million pages and your website or blog is on a page that users will never find. Hope that helps a little.
I agree, i’ve started changing the actually seo title of my posts in all in one seo pack to something that is more suited for search engines. So you can have an awesome title for your readers and a title that is optimized for search engines.
So are you changing title of your old published posts? That must be really time consuming..
But yes, the benefits of it are always what will be making you happy and making you forget the time and hard effort you spent in doing it.
Thanks for your comment.
Yeah, I’ve started devoting more time to my old posts. Rewriting paragraphs that don’t seem to work, change some images here and there – always kills a few hours of time 😛
I thought of doing this also. But I really got bored after I almost completed the task for January month of 2010. You know there are many posts on this blog and clicking edit button on each and every article is like..uhh..grr. 😀
Definitely a well optimized title is sure to bring in higher traffic than a non-optimized one. When making a keyword research, I’m currently using Google’s keyword tool and it does the job quite well. The problem with the title SEO is that one needs to make sure that the title is both appealing to humans and to search engines. After all you are aiming to please visitors rather than the search engines, so it is necessary to choose wisely.
Nice to know that Daniel and I agree with you on that.
Daniel, I have heard somewhere that Google is going to stop that keyword tool service soon. I read an story headline at serpd.com as “R.I.P Google Keyword Tool” which I think meant that Google has decided to shut it down in someway. So you might want to check out the alternatives once.
Thanks for your comment Daniel.
All great tips you’ve discussed here.I agree, link baiting is not creating deciteful titles. SEO in fact do not sustain in deceiving users. Google keeps track of bounce rates and those keywords which Google ranked you wrong is gradually adjusted and is of no use if it gets high bounce rate. Moreover, readers will get most annoyed if they find in post other than what they expected.
Well that’s something new for me also Suresh from your comment.. I didn’t knew Google is utilizing our bounce rate to decide how to rank that page. I think I must read the posts that tells 200 signals Google is using to rank a page as I may found something more interesting.
Thanks for coming here and commenting sir.
Of course that the tile is important, in SEO but I think more important then the tile is the content, a good content optimized for SEO it will do wanders.
Yes, that’s right! Title is a part of on-page optimization and I just talked on it in this post but content also plays a very major role in ranking a page which should be also given priority.
Thanks for your comment Dragos.
Great article. Since the title is usually the first thing people see in emails, twitter tweets or on blogs, it is extremely important to create engaging title. One of the ways how to learn to create great titles is following yourself. Monitor – which titles you click and why you do that. What kind of emails you are opening. This is the starting point. However, if you will use How to, The Secret or 5 Things…. in your title, you will get a reasonably good amount of clicks.
Hey Peter..I have found myself clicking those titles more which makes me feel to find the surprise content behind that title. That means, I click on those title more that is creative and doesn’t reveals much about what is going to be in the content and creates a little suspense.
Thanks for your comment Peter.
The first thing that search engines notice on your post is the title of your post, so in title you have to use keywords that you targeting and see instant rankings.
That’s right. Search Engines do take the meta title seriously which many people forget. For any keyword ranking website you will see that the main keyword is being used nearly at the starting and Google most probably ranks those page well.
Thanks for your comment Maraign.
Hi, just wondering about how long the number of words / characters are allowed in title tags. Because sometime I found a post with very long tittle. yet, even all keywords are included within the title tag..
thanks for your explanation
A good search engine optimized title should not be more than 50-55 characters in length..The main keyword should be added in the starting for better results.
The title is one of the most important elements about your page, then the title chosen for a particular page should be unique to that page because each page of your website has a different purpose and contains unique content so the title should reflect that purpose.
I agree on your statement that title is an important element of a page and we should always use title that is relevant to the contest because that is what called on-page optimization. If you use a title which doesn’t matches well with your content, then you will have hard time watching it rank well on search engines.
Thanks for commenting Biodun.
Excellent article that covers the basics. I’m in a small niche so when I was getting started I looked at my competition to see how I could do things better. Then I chose my domain name and from there it has been writing content rich posts with keywords included and then commenting on other blogs has also brought heaps of traffic. So far Google seems to be happy as got onto page 1 fairly quickly. Working hard to keep it that way.
Patricia Perth Australia
Great to know that Patrica that you are taking many important seo elements into consideration while ranking your website. You are going in right direction and that’s why you are noticing good results.
Thanks for commenting here Patrica.