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Issue #120: Title Finishing Work
----------------------------------------------------------------- SearchReturn Discussion List "Understanding Internet Search Technology" ----------------------------------------------------------------- Moderator: Published by: Disa Johnson SearchReturn http://www.searchreturn.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- March 06, 2007 SearchReturn Issue #120 ----------------------------------------------------------------- SEND POSTS: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Refer a friend: http://www.searchreturn.com/subscribe.shtml ----------------------------------------------------------------- .....IN THIS DIGEST..... // -- ESSENTIAL TIPS -- // "Title Finishing Work" ~ SearchReturn ----------------------------------------------------------------- // -- ESSENTIAL TIPS -- // ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> Title Finishing Work In previous installments, we've covered some essential guidelines that a good title writer must consider at all times when crafting their text for titles. The preceding tips were accumulated through years of careful contemplation authoring sites before and through to the days of SEO. The logic SEO experience has brought us changed the writing style and provided marketing benefits including popular keywords and phrases. The resulting tips are relatively timeless. Though search engines change, titles resist change because of their continued importance outside search. No matter what the current space allows, limit your length to less than the character count which appears in popular search engine listings. Recall you are writing titles as bookmark text since search listings are basically that (and titles literally are that). Take note of special space consisting of the first few words, (twenty-five characters or so). Finally, either use your brand, (or simply lose it) and virtually never place your brand at the end of the string. What remains is the difference in approach for different types of pages and thoughts on how to draw and distill keywords and phrases out. If you haven't written your content intentionally to include popular keywords we'll need to discuss that at some point. The following actually assumes you have not taken that step since it can pollute the title writing process. If you find it difficult to follow these steps and you have optimized the body, you may have too high a density in keyword usage. First and foremost, a homepage title must be written far more broadly than an interior page. You want to capture not just the essence of the homepage, but the entire purpose of the site. This is because your homepage title will appear in listings far more frequently than any other page. The special space and its powerful combination of keywords must present search users with the best phrasing you can muster. As for brand, even if your interior pages may not have it, this page can be an exception to the rule. Just remember brand goes in front. The rest of the way, think hard about a combination of the most popular keywords. Work with those words in a manner that conveys the essence of the site as a whole. The combination may just present itself to you from these keywords. Next you want to do the finishing work on the homepage title by completing the text so that it offers some uniqueness or other benefit your site provides based on the subject matter in your power phrase combination. Use only words that appear in the body and if not, these words will highly likely be ones you can easily include in a heading, bullet or elsewhere. Having the words in the title alone can weakly suffice for listings, but remember users will need the visual queue that they are in the correct place *after* they click - and search engines reward this. If the words you want in the title aren't in the copy, get them in somewhere where landing users will see them immediately, without scrolling. Bullets and headlines are great for this. There are at least two main types of interior pages you will want to pay close attention to. We call these category pages and product level pages in ecommerce, but these terms can easily be translated in meaning to your content driven site if that's what you're working with. The connotation here is that category pages are one level down from homepages, covering an array of specifics under one topic, and product level pages are specific to one detailed item or topic. Avoid simply listing your product page topics in category page titles, and instead approach the work as you would when doing homepage titles except you have far more refined sets of words to work with (making your life a little easier). Category page titles should work broadly on the category topic similarly as homepage titles. Product level pages, on the other hand, have a purpose singular to that page and must be treated entirely differently. Most SEOs do product level title writing reasonably well. After reading all the noise online about writing titles, they know they must include the keywords distilled from the page body. No where is this more important than product level pages. You can have titles on the homepage or even major category pages where a word or two isn't in the body and it can still do fine, (although that is not optimal). But you suffer far greater loss of power on product level pages when the words you are using in the title do not appear in the body. It's only fine if there is virtually no no other matching content on the Web. There are several reasons why this is important. Suffice it to say that the main reason is you are working with more refined, less popular search terms where your rankings will rely more on body content than inbound link text. Since you are working with an interior page and specific product or topic, you will have fewer inbound links to that page, and may not have any inbound links that use the text with your keywords. Write your titles for these pages entirely from the words that are found in the body. This is the correct time to bring into the discussion an important note about repetition. Product level page title writing is inherently predisposed to risky repetition. The following also applies, however, to all title writing. You may have found through your work that repeating does indeed boost your rankings a bit for the words used more than once in the title. This may be a fleeting benefit or one that is not due to the repetition as much as you think and is partly due to other factors. Where SEOs get into real trouble is when they ruin the title repeating keywords and arguing it still somehow makes literal sense. This old trick actually has its roots in writing directory descriptions for Yahoo! back in the mid-nineties. The idea was to stuff keywords using a comma separated list and design the text to satisfy the rules of complete sentences so that in theory it could pass the category editor review process. The results of all this is terrible quality. Repeating and listing is where SEOs go awry. If you sense the need to repeat a keyword for rankings and think you know a way to do it, limit repetitions carefully. Try not to ever repeat a word more than three times. Repeating also *must* make sense in the text so that its quality doesn't suffer as a bookmark. You may be able to take the tack with your repetition that you include varying forms of the word. A premium quality example of this appears in SR issue #116: Nice Title. http://www.searchreturn.com/digest/116.shtml Michael Zerman cleverly wrote text that incorporates the word [bodysurf] repeated three times in varying forms: bodysurf, bodysurfers and bodysurfing. Not only that, but the name of the website appears at the start. Even if the special power at the front of the title exceeds our suggestion of twenty five characters (at thirty four), the excellent compromise was made since the very first word is bodysurfing and the organization name will itself attract more clicks. Note that a word needs only appear once to qualify for a listing. Google bombs proved it doesn't even have to be there at all. Certainly more instances of keyword usage adds weight for higher rankings, but if the quality of the page or title suffers as a consequence, your performance degrades without a hint from tracking. You think you're doing alright when you could actually be do much better. A better title that is more professional will get more traction for clicks and extra weight from click ranking can climb your listing to the top. Michael's excellent example nicely illustrates the top concepts from the series even though he wrote his title before we published. A special note of thanks to Michael Zerman, a longtime I-Search reader who faithfully subscribed and contributes to SearchReturn. Thanks for that mate! Makes me want to write a page on my own bodysurfing past and link his title to the target. That's our main timeless advice on title so far. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stay Tuned. Got feedback?: http://www.searchreturn.com/feedback.shtml Archives: http://www.searchreturn.com/digest-archive.shtml Alternate formats: http://www.searchreturn.com/info-formats.shtml Manage Subscriptions: http://www.searchreturn.com/help/manage-subs.shtml Problems unsubscribing? Contact the postmaster: mailto:postmaster@searchreturn.com Information on how to sponsor this publication: http://www.searchreturn.com/help/advertise.shtml Published by SearchReturn http://www.searchreturn.com Website Membership: http://www.searchreturn.com/register.shtml The contents of the digest do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SearchReturn or Disa Johnson. SearchReturn and Disa Johnson make no warranties, either expressed or implied, about the truth or accuracy of the contents of the SearchReturn Digest. Copyright 2007 Disa Johnson. All Rights Reserved. -----------------------------------------------------------------