Are you making the
most of your Title Tags? Let's talk about some easy ways to fine tune
your pages that you think could be performing a little better. Of all of the other choices
a potential visitor may have to choose from, within the top search results,
you want to make yours just a little more unique, a little more
compelling than the next guy who may just throw their Title tag
together with very little thought. Now for the sake of this
article, we are not suggesting this tip for the purpose of
improving your ranking, but rather for improving your click
through ratios, regardless of the ranking (so long as you are
within the top 10.) If more people are compelled to view
your link than some other competing link, then that has some
significant merit.
We know there
are at least 200 influences in ranking criteria and this article
assumes that you've already had some professional training and
instruction in that aspect. You are aware that solid SEO work
includes things like on-page factors, off-page factors and even
artificial intelligence (AI) these days. However, the suggestion
for working with your Titles that I have for you here is not just about rankings and
visibility, but it's about improving the click through
ratio for your pages.
These are just a few
quick tips that you may find helpful.
To begin, let's take a good look at your Title tags and see if you
can't improve them a little.
Try this tip on some
of your pages which you feel need improvement or could use a
higher percentage of visitors.
Consider
including 3 elements in your title. These days every one knows
that it can be important to have your researched keyword phrase
included in your title. But then what do some people do? Often you'll see
people stuffing their Title full of keywords in hopes that they
may show up for those terms. "Keyword stuffing" is not
competent SEO no matter who may think so and it's not
recommended. Instead, your focus is to always create high
quality, useful content that will please visitors. Your title
needs to be compelling and it needs to read well and it should
make sense to the reader.
Try this
approach:
Use your
keyword phrase up front, followed by a clicking
trigger,
followed by a genuine benefit that your
product offers.
What do I mean by a
"keyword?". When I
talk about your primary keyword phrase, I'm assuming you know how to research
and target the right phrase which is essential. However, If you
are not sure how to do keyword research, then read
this article here. If you are brand new to optimization, you
may want to study one on our online
SEO courses.
What do I mean by a
"Trigger?" A
trigger is simply an action related "reason" why
someone chooses to respond. For example there are certain
triggers or reasons why people will buy something. Among these
are topics related to
health, safety, education or learning, making money, saving
money, improving appearance, losing weight, gaining status
etc.
If you are familiar with writing sales copy,
you'll be aware that there are a
whole list of "reasons" why someone will buy or take
action.
What do I mean by a
"Benefit?" This is
the old "what is in it for me" factor that's
essential to all salesletters.
Of course these are
all good essential elements for writing a sales letter. The difference
here is that I am suggesting you move these elements right up
into your Title tag where you will have them visible within the search results. The result should be a Title that reads
well and compels the reader to take action and choose your link over other
competing links regardless of where you rank in the top 10
results or so. After all, working with Title Tags is very easy
to do.
For Example: (I'm
making these examples up on the fly)
Maybe you are selling an e-book. The trigger would be
"learning" (people will pay to learn something).
The e-book might be on how to breed rare tropical fish. Maybe
the book is a fairly quick read but details important
information that you can absorb in a couple of days. This could
be the benefit - (the short learning time).
So your title may
read like this:
Breed tropical fish - Learn
how to breed rare tropical fish for fun
and profit in just 48 hours.
or get a little more specific to narrow up on the niche. Maybe
it's about "angel fish"...
Breed angel fish - Learn
to breed exotic angel fish for fun
and profit in just 48 hours.
A few other examples of
keyword plus trigger
plus benefit.
Piano
lessons - Learn how
to memorize beautiful chords over this
weekend.
Diamond
jewelry - Discover how
to grade color cut and clarity like a
gemologist.
Okay let's play with
a few other triggers ideas based on earning money:
Start
a home based business - Ideal
earning potential while you
set your own hours
Internet
based business
- Start
earning immediately
as you
work from home
Smart
investments earn
a second income online
while you sleep.
Or triggers ideas
based on streamlining a process:
Keyword
research - save hours of
research time and instantly find top results in
only minutes
Pool
heaters - eliminate
energy waste and
save $100 per month heating your pool
Renew your mortgage
- Get an Instant quote quicker than your bank!
By getting a little
creative, I'm sure you'll come up with even better examples than
I have demonstrated here. Just remember to do proper keyword
research using a tool like Wordtracker. Also really give some
thought to the objective of each page. Try and identify a unique
buying trigger (the reason why people buy) for your specific
product. Also think about the benefits over features.
Use all of these
elements creatively to fashion a Title tag that will build
curiosity, offer value, educate, put forth a question or grab
your readers attention in some way. Of course the most
clever title won't really benefit you unless you are also
creating quality content for the visitors to read once they
click through to your page. We assume
that our readers already understand the value of creating useful
content. This quick tip is just a reminder that regardless of
how good your Web site may be, there are always ways to improve
it even further and add more value for your visitors.
Sometimes, with a
little thought, you can use your keyword phrase up
front, followed by a clicking trigger,
followed by a product benefit
and even tie the sentence as a whole, into the objective of your
page.
For example, you may have a product for sale, or you may have a
different objective for the page. Perhaps you are just asking
someone to sign up for a newsletter. See if you can you tie it
into that Title statement. Be creative.
Start by taking a
look at your log files and checking your ranks to see which
pages could use some work. Be cautious about changing
pages that are already scoring within the top 5 results. Focus
more on some of the weaker scoring pages that may be ranked
between say 5 and 15 but you can tell they could use a little
more creative thought and work on the titles. By
simply writing more compelling titles, combined with high
quality content that is of genuine value to your visitors,
you'll enjoy significant value in the increased click through
ratios.
On a
final note, make absolutely sure that your Web page has a solid
"call to action." Make it clear to your visitors what
you would like them to do. Sometimes the smallest little edits
to your pages can make significant differences.
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About John Alexander
John Alexander is the Co-Director of
Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together,
they
teach their students the full spectrum of SEO skills in their "hands on"
search
engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. John also teaches online
SEO training courses,
and he’s an official member of the Wordtracker
official question support team. John is also author of the
popular e-book Wordtracker
Magic.
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