Titles do a lot of work on the net. A good title can get a mediocre piece of content read, and a bad one can kill content outright. Titles need to draw in search engines, attract users, and achieve your business aims. This is a lot to ask of a mere string of five to seven words.

Seeking professional assistance is often a good way to go with any part of your online content and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about your site’s content planning. Many businesses find that this solves most of their content worries. However, no matter what precautions you take, times may still eventuate when you need to compose your own titles.

There are three elements that you need to consider when composing good titles for search engine optimisation. Those elements, in no particular order, are:

Style

The style of your title needs to be guided by the site it’s going to be posted on. A catchy title might work well on Facebook, but it’s likely to bomb in a technical publication. A witty title just won’t work if all the content around it is deadly serious.

At the same time, style can be played with. The conventions of the page you’re posting on do need to be taken into account, but sometimes breaking the rules is what gets you noticed. Some of the most effective titles come from people who have studied the conventions carefully, then turned them on their head.

Substance

The style of your title is dictated by the broad group of users who partake of the site your content is to be posted on. The substance of your title, in other words the topic it addresses, will be guided by the much smaller group of your particular target users. Substance is what will drive individual internet users to read your content.

Again, there are rules about substance that you can afford to ignore. The topic of a good piece of content has been chosen carefully. The way in which it is presented within the content has also been carefully done. This doesn’t mean that simply posting the topic as your title is likely to get you readers. Sometimes a vague hint at the topic, or a tantalising question, can be more effective.

SEO

This element should be fairly self-explanatory. An optimised title needs to feature your keywords, and the best place to put them is as far to the left as possible.

It’s not always easy to fit keywords into a title naturally. Many people have extreme trouble slipping keywords into the small space of a title, and the result is clunky and unnatural. This kind of obvious SEO is unlikely to encourage users to read your content.

Fusing the three elements

There is a tension between these three elements, and sometimes the three exist in conflict. No matter how difficult it is, a good title needs to incorporate all three elements. An acceptable title might sacrifice one of these elements for the others, although this is likely to produce borderline acceptable results.

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