Think Carefully about Your Title Tags

Think Carefully about Your Title Tags


Twitter Forces Bloggers to Think Carefully about Post Titles and Title Tags

Title tags are extremely important for SEO, as they are highly valued by Google and most all the other search engines. Title tags should include primary keywords and ideally be limited to about 64 characters.

Twitter has made blog post title tags more important than ever. When a blog post is tweeted and retweeted multiple times, it can generate a lot of well qualified traffic to that post. There are Twitter tools available that reduce tweeting and retweeting to an easy, one or two click operation. I most often use the Hootlet feature of HootSuite or the TweetMeme button that appears at the top and/or bottom of many blog posts.

When you use Hootlet or TweetMeme, the blog post’s title tag becomes the default text in your tweet. This is important, because not everyone will take the time to edit that default text to make his or her tweet more interesting or informative.

If your title tag is vague, dull, too short, too long, or otherwise uninspiring, you’ll get fewer retweets and less traffic coming to the post.

The Need for Post Titles and Title Tags

In WordPress, your post title defaults to the title tag. Sometimes – if you’re trying to promote your post on Twitter, for instance – you’ll want to customize your title tag. Here’s a popular post of mine, SEO Opens the Door, But You’ll Need More to Close the Deal. I quickly created a custom title tag for this post, “SEO and Customer Service Needed for Conversions”. Once the custom title tag is created, my post title becomes the h1 tag.

Why would I do his?

  1. I thought the post title conveyed a bit of a story and contained a little mystery, which would inspire people to read on once they arrived at the post.
  2. I thought the post title was a bit too long and vague to serve as good default text for Twitter.
  3. I wanted to target the keywords “SEO” and “customer service”, reasoning that people tracking these words on Twitter would find the post valuable. And incidentally, I felt the custom title tag would be more suitable for Google and traditional SEO.

Start with Your Title Tag and Work Backwards to Your Post Title

If you’re not sure whether you need a custom title tag, my advice: start there. If your title tag – which should be “all business” – looks clunky as a post title, compose a post title that will get readers interested once they arrive at the post. If you’re looking for inspiration for post titles, read 33 Foolproof Headline Strategies.

The Problem of Branding in Title Tags

Many SEO specialists, myself included, recommend branding in your title tags. I confess, I’m horribly inconsistent when it comes to doing this on my own blog. For instance, I should have made the title tag for the customer service post -

SEO and Customer Service Needed for Conversions | Word Sell, Inc.

However, branding can get to be an issue if you’ve got Twitter on your mind. For one thing, if your brand has a very long name, your default Twitter text may be too long to allow for unedited tweeting and retweeting. Again, the more work the Twitterer has to do, the less likely he or she will bother. In addition, inserting a branding message in a tweet can make it come off as too “salesy”, and clutter the message with text that doesn’t influence a person to click on the link.

Am I saying you should eliminate branding from your title tags? No. To be frank, I’m not really sure what the correct answer is, other than to say it varies from case to case. You might try experimenting with branded and non-branded title tags and track Twitter referrals. I doubt if there’s a one-size-fits-all formula – what do you think?
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word sell inc chicago online marketing servicesChicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting services, and content strategy consulting.