Generally accepted practices in SEO have indicated that title tags are for keywords and that any extraneous, marketing-type words should be reserved for meta descriptions and your on page copy. While I would agree that this is partially true, this line of thinking may require a bit more consideration.

The reason for the needed paradigm shift is the engines ability to factor in click through rate (CTR) into their ranking algorythm. So much like the impact of CTR on your quality score in paid search, it is believed that the rate at which people click on your organic listing versus the number of times your listing is shown is an important factor in determining organic rankings. If you think about it, it makes sense. A search engines goal is to give you the most relevant results for a particular query and CTR is a potentially a good indicator of what users find to be relevant. There are some potential holes in this logic, but I'll reserve that discussion for a different post.

So how does this play into your title tag strategy? Because in order to improve CTR, you need to make your listing stand out from the other 15-20 paid and organic listings on SERPs page so that users will be enticed. Also, because title tags are the one thing that you can almost always rely on to be a a part of your organic listing, this is really your best shot to improving CTR. Now making your title tags more interesting, and thus more clickable, does not mean abandoning keywords and using straight-up marketing speak. It simply means making title tags more readable and eye catching by taking a more descriptive approach.

For example, lets assume that we have a page about how to teach your dog to sit and your target keywords are: teach dog sit and dog sit training. An old title tag might look something like this:

"How to Teach Your Dog to Sit Training a Dog to Sit"

A more enticing title tag might look like this:

"Dog Training Experts Show How to Teach Your Dog to Sit from "

You can see how the second version is more eye-catching as it creates a sense of expertise and is also more readable.

When writing title tags, be sure to accurately represent your target search terms but also find creative ways to grab a user's interest. If you can do so, your organic search rankings will thank you.

Labels: search engine optimization, SEO, title tags