In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this.
Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."
There are many schools of thought regarding the Art of the Title, and generally this art varies according to purpose, medium, and culture. For better or worse, depending on your viewpoint, the Internet has changed what we expect from headlines, and how we shape them, but it is hardly a static art, especially with the advent of microblogging platforms like Twitter.
Headlines are tricky – especially when writing for the Web. You want to be search engine friendly, but at the same time, you don't want to readers (or potential readers) to skim over the headline like it's part of a technical manual.
SEO is about more than meta tags, title tags, and targeted anchor text. Call it "competitive webmastering", "SEO", or any one of a slew of other titles - it is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined that matters most.
A radio ad I heard the other morning starts out “Another how-to half minute from the Home Depot…”. Now, before you read on, what are you expecting to get out of the next 25 seconds or so left of this radio spot? A “how-to half minute” makes me ready to learn something about landscaping or home repair or even picking out appliances. Teach me something!!
Well now that people on the social media sites are starting to catch on / have caught on to link baiting, I’ve noticed it’s much harder to make the likes of the digg or reddit front pages. One to two months ago this was a much easier task. I’m not exactly sure if there has been one incident or algorithm change that caused the increased difficulty of making digg’s front page, but I do know that the window on link baiting is quickly closing.
Andrew Goodman recently posted about SEO industry reputation woes, but the real reason for the problem is the self serving agenda of search engines. Don't underestimate the marketing of the search engines, which outside of their own link buying and selling, generally like to hint at this equation SEO = spam.
Well it never just rains. It has to pour. I made an offer of some free SEO reviews a while back and a nasty confluence of happenings has upset my apple cart.
But I’m going to try and get some advice out to a few more people now. And this is going to be the toughest task I’ve had in a while. You see it never dawned on me that so many folk would be on hosted blogs. Let’s just say that optimising Blogspot is not a straight forward task.
Brian Clark has some excellent ideas for writing effective titles in his blog copyblogger. He has recently re-written headlines submitted by his readers along with a rationale for the changes. It’s a good way of demonstrating what works.
The Official Google Blog carries messages varying from discussions of Google's legal affairs to recommendations on relaxation techniques. The way Googlers title their posts has some other bloggers wishing for a little more clarity for those titles.
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