Best 'Page Title' practices to boost traffic | SEO

Understand Why to concern more on Title

Your blog or webpage title is the most important description about your site, because title is the first thing visitors look at when they visit your site. Your posts title will act as a primary piece of information and a decision point for the users to decide whether to click your site or not. Giving appropriate titles (by including proper keywords) will let the users have a quick insight on your site or page content. Users tries to go through a site that shows most related keywords relevant to their search query. At the end of this article, I have given some tricks that I implemented to utilize maximum keywords for better SEO.

So, title is the first and foremost concern for a blogger so as to enable him customize it in search results. Note that; Google generates page titles and descriptions automatically based on your site content as well as users search query (by taking some lines from your blog post). But giving short and detailed descriptions from your end, will make the search engines forceibliy display your site details in search results. Of course this has to be accompanied with 'snippets' like 'search descriptions'. Learn how to write separate search descriptions for better search results.

To get an idea of where actually the title tag appears, see the below picture and check the highlighted parts.

For blogger posts, the heading that  we give while writing a post (like the one shown as highlighted in the below picture) will by default be taken as the title in search results. However, google may sometimes show different titles based on user search query.

Features  and best practices

1. Avoid repetition 

Use unique titles and avoid duplicates. Duplicating will confuse the crawlers as well as users and may result in visitor quitting your page.

2. Use Keywords

Do a quick research of your posts content in order to include some major keywords in the title, so as to allow users find them in search results. The best thing is to check for popular search queries in keyword tracker tools available online (you may google it) and check what type of queries were asked in that search area. Identify the common terms included in all search terms (that appeared repeatedly in most of the queries) and do include that kind of keyword in your page title.

3. Don't over stuff

Google particularly recommends not to overstuff title's with keywords; crawlers consider this as spam. Best practice is to use not more than two keywords. Even using of commas ( , ) in titles will be considered as keyword stuffing by crawlers (even though it's not !). So avoid putting commas and stuffing much. Also include some some specific query terms that will attract the users and is mostly appeared in queries (check heading numbered 6 below).

Example of stuffing:  help for bloggers for blogging in blogspot

3. Descriptive and brief 

A Title that is very brief but descriptive and reasonably short will allow the users quickly navigate to them. It even helps search engines to quickly show them in top results. The more information you include, the better will be the search description, thus allowing crawlers as well as users find your site quickly and easily.

4. Special characters

You may use pipes ( | ), but commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuations are not appreciated. Placing pipes helps to shorten the title as well as improve readability with good look.

5. Brand name

Google says that putting brand name, helps the users identify the company and choose the page.Some users tend to visit just by seeing the company or brand even if they don't see related search queries or keywords. That's the power of branding. If you're a great and popular brand, then you should be doing this definitely. If you are a beginner like me and your brand is still in the process of popularizing, then better target for a legible title with proper usage of keywords and special query terms (check below).

6. Some special and effective terms to be included in title

Title's which begin with the following keywords are most appreciable and attracts the users largely. Check the list with examples.

How to 

How to is the most common term that I come across in the web world. Almost all the famous bloggers and gurus uses 'How to' countless number of times. 

Example - How to select page a title for better SEO

Learn

If your blog is educating people or guiding about anything, then the term 'Learn' can be most looked.

Example - Learn about page title for blogger posts

Some other common terms with examples

               Term                                     Example    

• Top reasons - Top 10 reasons of organizing page titles, Top 10 reasons why you should organize page titles
• Best way  - Best way of choosing a title for a page
• 10 common mistakes - 10 common mistakes while choosing a page title
• All about - All about page title selection for SEO
• Essential facts - 10 essential facts about page title
• The importance of - Important things to be considered while choosing page titles
• What to  - what best to include in a page title
• what not to - what not to include in a page title
• Benefits of - Benefits of customizing page titles for better SEO 

Including questioning features like

• What is the best way ? - what is the best way of choosing page title's
• Is/are/does ? - is page title a concern for SEO ?
• Where should you ? - where should you bother for page title
• Which ? - which page titles helps to drive traffic to your page

Terms that I recommend not to include in a title

• Sentence words like if, but, then etc.
• Special charecters like dots, commas

Like I said above - If Google crawlers find more commas in the tile, then crawlers will consider that as a title having multiple keywords and so neglect that. Instead you may go for pipes ( | ) for better visibility and readability.

OK, if you wish to check how your post or page title appears in search results, just open your own post or page and move your cursor to the browser tab as shown by arrow in the below picture. Stay there and it will display the lines, that is actually your title and appears similarly in search results.

Finally let me finish this by bringing you the trick, that I employed to include maximum keywords for better indexing by search engines. the trick is i used different keywords for Title, Posts URL and even search description. Consider the example of this post. For this post, the Title that I choose is

Title

"Best 'Page Title' practices to boost traffic | SEO"

Important words - Best, page title, practice, traffic, SEO

URL

http://easybloggerstuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-to-write-page-titles-for-SEO.html

Important keywords- how to, write, SEO

Search Description

How to select best title tags | learn what to include and what not to include by following the tricks for better SEO results.

By doing this, I hope - my page might be displayed to users who may pose queries like

1. What to include in page titles
2. what not to include in page titles
3. Best ways of selecting page titles
4. how page titles help SEO
5. And more similar search queries

These are the points that I wished to bring before you so that you could mind them.

Hope this helps.

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