When your site appears in SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the page title is the first thing user can see. It appears at the top of the result for your page, giving users the very first echo of what your page is about.
The title of the page is one of critically important factors when you want to succeed in doing SEO. In this article, we are going to talk about how you can create unique and accurate page titles in 4 simple steps.
4 steps towards a catchy, relevant title
A catchy title is a must – remember, you optimize for humans, not for robots! What makes a title catchy? There are a few things you can do to make the title of your page catchier yet still relevant, both for SEO and for social media sharing:
- Tell part of the story. Your users need to know what the article is circa about upon reading the title of the article, but they need to be kept interested so that they continue to read the rest of the article.
Example: “Top 5 Ways of Making Product-A Useful” is a good title, but “5 Ways You Can Make Product-A Useful in Everyday Situations” is catchier for its conversational styling.
- Keep the title relevant, even when you are trying to grab attention. A lot of site owners make the mistake of using a catchy title that doesn’t really represent the main topic of the article. After a while, users will quickly judge the site as being ‘bombastic’ but not necessarily reliable or accurate.
- Don’t stuff unnecessary keywords to the title. Add one – or two, maximum! – keyword so that your title is SEO-friendly, but focus more on telling what the article is all about.
- Keep the title short. There is no point is using long titles because Google and other search engines will cut the long titles short. Keeping the title short will also help make your site – or page – stands out in search results.
Mistakes to avoid
There are a number of common mistakes people still make when they set titles for their pages. These mistakes are actually very easy to avoid as long as you know how to spot them.
Some of the mistakes you should make when writing titles for search engine optimization purposes are:
- Keyword stuffing. It is very tempting to add as many keywords as possible to the title, but this will do more harm than good. Instead of stuffing the keywords you want to add, pick one that represents the article the most. The SEO impact will be much greater this way.
- Using the same title for all – or several – pages. Search engine crawlers still take page titles as important factors to consider, so using the same title for several pages will greatly reduce your site’s SEO performance.
- Putting the name of the site in every page title, especially at the beginning of the title. Adding the name of the site may seem like a logical thing to do, but it will use up important characters that you can use to describe the page more effectively.
In case you are building a brand alias “domain name is important”, be sure to add site name at the end of the title.
Do you have any “SEO question”? Are you interested into more search engine related talk? Then simply visit Seoquestions.club – SEO community I help to manage.
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