Back during my sophomore year I took the “Headline writing for journalists” class that taught aspiring journos to write attention grabbing headlines for newspapers and magazines. The core lesson was pretty simple: write to the point to attract and retain your readers.  Today this lesson can be easily adapted and applied to the web-based content: write your web page titles to the point to attract readers AND improve your search engine rankings.

But what is the page title and where do you find it? To use an analogy, I think of the page title as a newspaper headline and here is where you can locate it for any web page:

web page title in a browser

web page title in the search results

Titles appear at the top of web browsers, browser tabs as well as in the search results. Keep them short – preferably no longer than 70 characters. Make sure to run a keyword research to select one or two keywords best describing your page and use these templates to construct the SEO friendly page titles:

Primary keyword – secondary keyword | Brand name

Brand name | Primary keyword – secondary keyword

You should resist an urge to stuff your page title with every possible keyword related to your content- there is no evidence that longer titles improve your search engine rankings. Also remember that search engines can only display a limited number of characters, not to mention that having dozens of keywords looks spam-ish and unprofessional.

With that said, allocate enough time for the keyword research. Here is a basic plan if you don’t have much experience researching keywords. Start by using Google’s updated keyword tool: it is free, and you can search possible keyword combinations by words or phrases, websites, and even categories.

Google keyword tool

Select keywords which you expect your potential visitor to use to find your web page, but stay away from highly competitive search unless you have an established and popular site.

So let’s take mev.com as an example. The home page title is short, just 44 characters without spaces, and to the point: “Building Custom Interactive Web Solutions – MEV LLC.” We used the “Primary keyword – secondary keyword | Brand name” structure to optimize our title and also selected specific keywords.

In short, writing descriptive and SEO friendly page titles is not an overly complicated task: write to the point, run a thorough keyword research, tweak your page title keywords and you should find the winning combination.