Wiep has a good idea, and i like it. In fact i like it so much that i’m not going to repeat it here and advise you to visit his article right now!

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

I work for a big publisher. My colleagues are typically young, smart, woman, and yes, beautiful. They are very good at what they do, but have no (or little) technical background. That’s all right, but of course I have to get the message across. I won’t reach that by showing off my knowledge of HTML.

The best way to explain stuff, is to try to find out what your target audience already knows, and use that to connect your knowledge to theirs. So what do all journalists, editors, and professional bloggers know that we can use?

The 5Ws

Every journalist knows the principle of the 5Ws : Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Et voila: there you have your most important keywords.

Tell them to use these in the first couple of sentences of the article, but also in the description and metatitle. This is the most technical part: to show where in the backoffice the meta-description and metatitle are used, and where you can see them in Google.

If someone asks WHY to use the 5W’s, and not for instance a snappy headline, then simply tell them that that is not what people are looking for in Google (back it up with data if necessary).

The inverted pyramid

Traditional journalism is all about the inverted pyramid: put the most important content on top, and less important info at the bottom.

That however, sucks both for SEO and for web copywriting. People don’t read (only) the first sentences. They scan, and then decide what (and if) to read.

The way to write for that kind of reading, is to NOT use the inverted pyramid, but to put the important content (the 5W’s) throughout the article: in the beginning, middle, and end. It helps if this repetition varies: use a text, a list, an image, a subheading, etc.

Synonyms

Good writers use synonyms. It makes their writing more lively, and less boring. It’s also a good way to use more keywords. It makes sure that keyword density doesn’t get too high and the LSI part of SEO copywriting is covered also.

That’s it. These three principles of journalism work fine to explain SEO copywriting. It’s good for the audience to know that writing for Google does not conflict with good writing in general, and also that they were taught well at school and can use that knowledge for SEO copywriting.

And as always, I’m really curious about the way you tackle this, so leave a comment :)

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

Ow, the video is here.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

You also told them that it is a good idea to do so, because:

• it generates a lot of relevant content;
• people use the same words to describe something as they would when they search for it;
• these people are looking closely at your products and site, and talk about it … publicly. If they like it, you have fans. Everybody knows how important fans are;
• and a couple of reasons more I forgot to mention.

Your client is excited: ‘yes, I want user generated content for my site. Gimme gimme gimme!’ Now it’s up to YOU to actually make it work… What can you tell them?

Below is my own list of items I think about whenever this need arises. Every situation is different of course, and it’s probably far from complete. But it should give you something to work with. Use it for your own benefit.

And while we’re talking about co-creation anyway: if you’ve got additions, drop a comment!

Goal defining

What do you want to reach? It should fit into the goals that you’ve already set for the business as a whole, and the website in particular. So what sub-target (KPI) is the addition of user generated content supposed to reach? Think about stuff like:

• generation of unique content to support rankings;
• generation of quality content to support rankings;
• both the above;
• establishing a fan base;
• higher conversion rates (user generated testimonials);
• etc.

Situation

What has already been done:

• Is it already technically possible and easy for users to interact with the website?
• Is the content displayed on the same URL it’s supposed to support?
• is it hidden or shown in full sight?
• Are there enough visitors already on the website that will start to interact immediately?
• Or do you need to kick it off yourself?
• what does the competition do?
• can you handle criticism?
• can you handle moderation tasks?

Users

The users (including the business owners) of the website are crucial, of course. What do you know about them?

• What kinds of users does your website have?
• how many visitors?
• how many of them convert into buyers?
• Can you display their presence in a percentage(%)?
• Can you track their presence? (more info)
• What part would each group of users play in the content creation process? Think about: commenting, just reading, moderation, etc.

Gains

What reasons would each group have to interact. What do they gain from it. Think about reasons like:

• curiosity
• meaning
• to belong to a community
• doing good
• reflection
• ease, comfort, gain
• status (within the community)
• coping
• testify
• etc

They’re all psychological reasons – and needs. This part of your analysis is critical, because YOU are the one who has to think of a way to fulfill these needs. If interacting with a website makes a user feel good, they interact with the website. So what should the website OWNER do, to make someone feel good about interacting with the website? The same principle applies to the other needs, and the other types of users. This is a one on one translation from user types to needs to facilitation of needs.

Reputation and fear of communicating

That being said, there is another thing you should think about. Do you WANT people to tell others about your products? Can you handle criticism? Do you have people avaliable to monitor incoming reactions? Do you WANT to monitor it? Are you willing to LISTEN to the reactions people give? Is your organization equipped to deal with the influx of a lot of comments/reviews? Can you finance it? In general: do you have fear of communicating with your clients? If so, I would advise to get rid of that fear first (or the reasons of that fear) before you start communicating.

One example: a comic book store

Let’s say that you have a comic book store and that you sell your inventory online. You have a number of goals, but let’s assume the most important one is sales generation. The website already has a number of visitors and some of them, most notably collectors, are passionate about your products.

What you should do is collect some data first: visitor/user types, number of visitors, website KPI’s, etc. After that, you can start a brainstorm: what are their needs and how can you address those needs? The brainstorm is intended to come up with ideas about gains that address the already formulated needs of user groups.

A couple of types of users are: comic book readers / commenters / drawers / buyers / collectors, etc. The table below could be the start of a nice matrix:

The table above is just a beginning, not complete, and could probably be better visualized, but the idea is clear, I hope ;)

Conclusion

The most important thing I’m trying to tell here is that you must have insight about:

• the goals
• the users
• their (and your) needs
• how YOU can facilitate fulfillment of their needs
• how THEY fulfill your needs
• how that fulfillment adds to reaching your goals
• rinse, repeat…

In short: user needs

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

Watch how the pros do it. All of us get examples of it every single day. No, I’m not talking about Adsense adverts (though they are good too!), but spam. They’re sitting right there in your spambox… We know this already. But where do THEY get their inspiration?

This morning one spam mail passed the spamfilter and incited me to click. I usually don’t do that, but this one grabbed my attention. I’ll just show it first:

Ofcourse I only saw the headline first: ‘Naked mman superglued to exercise bike during heist‘. It sounded like a hilarious headline (I receive a number of newsletters every morning) and I clicked… Shit! Spam! LOL

I immediately remembered one of the greatest headlines of all time (new York Post, 1982): ‘Headless body in topless bar’.

Spammers learn from the best also :)

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

This article provides a thorough explanation of what metadescriptions are, why and when you should use them and how to write them. My focus here is to explain it as clearly as possible while still being deep enough to actually learn something.

This guide is the second part of a series about ’seo copywriting for dummies’. The first article was about the title-tag. You may wanna check that one too ;)

What is a meta-description?

They are usually defined in two ways:

1. The short text in your HTML sourcecode, the one that says: <meta name=”description” content=”the text of the metadescription” />
2. Sometimes, people also think it is the text snippet that search engines like Google show below the links in the SERPs.

People refer to both when they talk about ‘meta-descriptions’, but no. #1 is the true description. No. #2 is called a ’snippet’.

Why use meta-descriptions?

Descriptions are important for users, search engines, and webmasters. Google for example, uses it to improve both user experience and analytics of their search engine:

‘[the meta description] directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.’ [link].

A search engine user scans descriptions to find what he or she is looking for and a webmaster uses it to show them what a page is about. That is why a well-written and relevant meta-description helps increasing the percentage of clicks your website gets.

How to write: 5 basic rules

Here is a quick list:

1. < 150 characters;
2. aim for CTR improvement, NOT for ranking;
3. include keywords;
4. different queries, different descriptions;
5. it’s not necessary to create descriptions for EVERY page of your site;

Rule 1: < 150 characters
A description is short, concise by nature. The major search engines display no more than 150 characters, including spaces. If a description is longer, they cut it. I’m not saying this means that your descriptions should always be exactly 150 characters long. Sometimes it’s better to be short:

It really depends on the type of search queries people use. When we look at the example of Apple: people that see this are probably looking for the Apple homepage, and not for technical specs of the 3G implementions of the iPhone.

(p.s.: this image was an old screenshot. I cannot find this description for the Apple homepage now)

Rule 2: Aim for CTR improvement, NOT for ranking
Meta-descriptions will NOT help you gain better rankings. But that does not mean you should forget them.

On the contrary!

Think of it as an advertisement. If humans absolutely trusted the suggestions Google gives them, then why is that generally 50% of the people (based on AOL’s data dump of 2006) do NOT click the first result?

It’s because they make up their own minds. And that’s where good writing WILL help you! This also means that descriptions cannot be seen separate from the title-tag. They’re a combo, and dance very well together.

Rule 3: Include keywords
Even though descriptions have no effect for better rankings, they DO impact the way people interact with it.

That is why you should always include keywords. It’s what people are looking for and if your description contains the words people entered as search query, they will be bolded:

Update: I forgot to mention a very important and obvious reason why you should always include the most important keywords in a meta-description. Because it depends on the query someone entered into the search engine, it is by no means obvious to a search engine that the description you gave up in the meta name=”description” field actually provides the best snippet. So you should incorporate the most important keywords in your descriptions too… 

Rule 4: Different queries, different descriptions
People use different kinds of queries to find different kinds of information. The four most well-known types of queries are:

1. navigational: people are looking for a website about a subject, for example: ‘homepage Packard Bell computers‘;
2. informational: people look for non-commercial information, for instance ‘name actress a beautiful mind‘;
3. commercial investigation: a mix of commercial and informational queries, for instance ‘water management expert‘;
4. transactional: looking to buy stuff or a local company: ‘Indian restaurant Nijmegen‘;

It might pay off to determine which type of meta-descriptions are best suited for your website or even different parts of the website.

Here are some examples of description types. I thought of them myself, so if you have better examples, please let me know!

Navigational: ‘The homepage of Apple‘
Informational: ‘Film: A Beautiful Mind. Cast & crew: Jenniffer Connelly [Alicia], Piet Bambergen [Kees], Year: 2005, Rating: 7.5‘
Commercial Investigation: ‘Need a heating expert in Nijmegen? Piet & co. fix your heating problem fast, efficient, and cheap‘
Transactional: ‘Chicken Tikka for $4.99. Delivered within 30 minutes. Order Indian food online now!‘

Note that the navigational description is short and the more informational queries are longer.

Rule 5: Not every page needs a description
Search Engines like to pick the first good sentence they find in a bodytext and use that as a description.

A practical tip would be to take the first sentence of your copy and use a call-to-action in it instead of writing a separate meta-description. You can do the same for other parts of your text. Place a call-to-action next to your most important keywords in the text. They might end up being a description.

Conclusion

Meta descriptions are like advertisements in the organic search results. Treat them as such and understand how search algorithms and people view them. If you make the most of that knowledge, you can increase the click through rates of your listings.

A whole lot can be, and has been, said about meta-descriptions and their use for SEO purposes. This article is not unique in that it provides new insights. But I do think it helps explaining this basic SEO knowledge as clear as possible and still is advanced enough to really teach something.

Suggested reading

[link] Some nice tips from Google itself, specifically some nice alternative writing method tips.

[link]: a good introduction to why you want to write descriptions, and how different search engines dealt with it in 2004. A 2007 followup is written here.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

Last week I had the assignment to quickly write about 20 pages of text for a website in a *very* competitive market (travel). There was no real budget to hire copywriters and there was a tight deadline. I managed to do it in just under 8 hours.

Management summary

For those of you who do not like to read much, I used this workflow:

1. keyword research: focus keyphrase, secondary keywords, synonyms, and LSI;
2. text format: create variants for different parts of text;
3. fill in and vary the format variants (by using the different keywords, synonyms etc);
4. create unique sentences for EVERY text, as much as possible within the time you have!!!;
5. write meta-titles and descriptions (also use a format and vary);
6. check everything and make sure the right keywords are used.

Here is a screenshot of how it looked like:

Content shuffle

Content shuffling is a way to quickly produce a large quantity of texts. The idea is simple: make a bunch of standard sentences and ’shuffle’ them around. You can automate this, but that will NOT deliver good results. Both Google and Human Readers will hate you for it. It will also cost time/money to write software that does this adequately (if at all).

But that doesn’t mean you should abandon shuffling all together. By using a tight organization and formatting of your text, and even some short standard sentences, you can quickly produce texts manually. They will not be top-notch, but sometimes that is good enough.

Below is the way I did it. I’m curious about the way you do this!

Keywords

You start with keywords. Always.

First, I did a little keyword research of about 15 minutes. That’s fast, but from experience I already know which keywords I should use in this market.

The focus keyphrase I chose was relatively simple: $product $destination. There were three kinds of products (tickets, car rental, hotel, etc.) and various destinations.

The product keywords
For every type of product, there were about 5 synonyms that promised a lot of traffic and competition, and were most relevant. I chose the best one of them to use in the title-tag, H1, a subheader and throughout the text.

After the focus keyphrase, I chose the secondary keywords (the synonyms), and some combination words that convert nicely. Think about words like: ‘cheap’, ‘reliable’, etc. I also looked up some semantically related words to the products (I will write a post about LSI some day). I use these to support the overall ‘theme’ of my pages.

The destination keywords
I figured these out while I was writing the texts.

It’s not about the products you sell, it’s about what people want to do with it. In the case of a travel website, you cannot simply say: ‘hey, this is the destination, the name of the hotel is this, and the price is $567,-’.

People look for INFORMATION and ACTION. Why is this a nice city to visit? Why should I buy tickets from this website? Can I rent a car if I buy these tickets? What are the hotspots in this city? In the small amount of time I had I could not possibly answer all questions, but you’ll be amazed how much you can do in a short time frame if you have a plan :)

For every $product $destination text, I looked up synonyms of the destination name. Example: Girona in Spain is also called Gerona; Cologne is also called Köln or Keulen; Beijing is also called Peking, and so on.

Text format

I thought of a format for all texts:

1. start with 25-50 words about the product and place some call-to-actions along with it;
2. the core of the text is at least two paragraphs (100 words) with destination information;
3. conclude with more information about the company, and mention or link to related offers to this product (25-50 words). In this part there are also call-to-actions.

The call-to-actions were simply little dialogs between text and customer: ‘buy/book/order $product, because $company offers these/this POD's‘ (POD = Point of Difference)

Throughout the text, the focus keyphrase is mentioned at least 3 times (beginning, middle, end), and one time in a subheader (H2). The synonyms and semantically related words are used less frequently, but throughout the text. Also, within the texts, there are optimized links to related products and to local authority websites.

Meta texts

I also made a format for the title-tags and meta-descriptions. They were something like this:

Meta-title: Cheap $product $destination? Compare $synonym_of_product.

Meta-description: $brand_name offers cheap $product to (note: or 'in') $destination. We offer the best deals for $synonym_of_product.

I wrote a couple of variants like this and used them.

The actual writing

For the first and last part of the texts, I wrote about three global variants and made sure that all sentences were SHORT. This has to do with the way Google calculates shingles and detects duplicate content issues. I also ‘broke’ the shingles by making them as unique as possible through using variants of words, make some them plural, use synonyms, etc.

The middle part of the text is unique for every page. I simply sought and found two to three notable sightseeing locations in every city and wrote a couple of sentences about that. If possible, I would link to a local authority website.

Finishing up

I checked if the focus keyphrase was mentioned in the title, H1, a H2 and at least three times in the text. Of course I would also check if the grammar was okay and the texts made sense.

This is the method I use to quickly write up texts. If there is more time, I do not use pre-formatted variants of sentences but simply make every sentence unique.

So how do you write optimized texts? I’m also curious if you know of another way to quickly produce texts that are as unique as possible, contain the right keywords, and are still very readable by human readers.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

p.s.: I’ll be in Barcelona with my girlfriend, seeing some touristic things and visiting our Spanish colleagues from Onetomarket. I have been working on a post of my own and maybe i’ll publish it this week. If not, it will be in two weeks.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

It’s all written by SEOs, for SEOs.

But what about the editors that receive hundreds of press releases on a daily basis?

I compiled a list of questions and asked several editors of major news websites and traditional media. The goal being to learn more about this subject from ‘the other party’: those who get it in bulk. How do they handle it?

So here is the second response by Rutger Betlem of Sprout.nl. Enjoy, learn, and tell me what you think!

General

1. Introduction: who are you and what is your business with Press Releases (=PR)?

Rutger Betlem, chief editor online at Sprout – a small business magazine (publisher: VNUmedia). I receive several dozen press releases a day – I filter and distribute among colleagues and freelancers

2. Please describe your organization

Sprout focuses solely on innovative small business entrepreneurs with less than 50 people employed – about 90 percent of our target group is higher educated

3. please give me your definition of ‘press release’

See 4

4. What is a good press release?

A proper press release informs a magazine or website with usable information. E.G. no attachments in a blank page, a distinct subject line, the news on top, the total press release in the body of the text (email), adjust/target the news to the medium (news can never be copied to all media), no officialese and other mumbo jumbo, make sure that contact persons can be reached at all times, make sure the press releases contains news (companies that send out press releases every week will be ignored), make sure older press releases can be found on the company website, always use the bcc-field in email, preferably there’s a story to be told, other than just ‘we have a new product’, it helps when a press release is sent out to specific editors rather than a general e-mailadress

5. Please provide me with some recent examples of good PR and tell me why you like them. This helps me to better understand your opinions

Those made by pr-professionals with knowledge of the magazine, the target group and the journalist they want to reach

6. Do you use a distinction between different kinds/categories of PR? If so, which ones? If not, why not?

nope

Statistics

7. How many PR does your newspaper/news website/blog receive on a daily basis?

Hard to tell – between 50 and 200

8. How much % of it actually gets published?

Between 1 en 4 percent

9. How do you think these numbers relate to newspapers/news websites/large group weblogs in general (worldwide, Europe, Netherlands)? What data or opinions is this answer based upon?

I think all media get badly written and dumb press releases. I have been an editor for 10 years now and the figure mentioned above was never higher than 4 percent at any of the magazines/websites I worked for.

Organization

10. How many people in your organization are occupied with PR? In what ways?

We all read and distribute the incoming press releases. Some are personal,
others go directly to our combined emailbox.

11. How do you receive PR? (specific channel, emails, technical format, etc.)

Mostly email

12. In what way(s) (channels and technical format) would like to receive them?

email

13. Do you only receive PR or do you (also) set out to find them? If so, where?

A little of both. News sites are important too – Interesting news makes me search for the source

14. please describe the process of PR publishing: from the moment you receive it to publication, to evaluation

1. reading the header
2. reading the news
3. looking at the attachments
4. contemplate
5. call the sender or discuss the release with colleagues (and delegate)
6. call other parties involved
7. write!

15. Do you alter the title of a PR? If so: how many % of PR are altered, how is this organized and why?

The pr-title is seldom used

16. Do you alter the text of a PR? If so: how many % of PR are altered, how is this organized and why?

100% – it is not always necessary – editorial objectivity forces me :-)

17. Do you alter links within a PR? If so: how many % of PR are altered, how is this organized and why?

Depends on the info the link refers to

18. Do you think there is a difference between different media types (newspapers, news websites, other) in the way they handle PR? If so, what is it?

Online media make more mistakes – they publish more (quicker) and are not as thorough as newspapers

19. Do you think your organization handles PR in a normal way or is it different? Why?

We are pretty average

20. Are PR evaluated in your organization? How?

We do try to educate professional pr-agencies in what info we would like to receive from them

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

21. Do you know what SEO is?

yes

22. Do you recognize the work of an SEO in a PR? How?

SEO in the press release isn’t that important, since most pr’s are sent by email

23. Do you regard PR that is optimized for search engines as an ‘issue’ or is it no issue at all? Why?

I think contacting the right media with fitting news is more important than being found in search engines

24. How much is a link (or reference to website if print newspaper) from a page on your website/newspaper worth? What data or opinions is this answer based upon?

No idea

25. Let’s assume you receive a PR you like and want to publish. You also see the text is optimized for Search Engines: it contains keywords and links. How do you respond?

I still rewrite – our SEO criteria might differ from those of the sender

26. Regarding the previous question: is publishing a link with a keyword rich link text an explicit choice? (in other words: do you explicitly think about the link and its link text and decide to copy it or not?)

yes

27. Do you ‘nofollow’ links in PR? (if you don’t know what ‘nofollow’ is, skip this question)

No

Tips

28. In general: which kinds of PR shall always be published and which never? Why?

Press releases that are well written and well targeted might be published. Others never

29. Regarding the previous question: what are the three most important tips you can give to those who write PR?

See 4

30. Do you have some specific tips for SEO consultants like me?

Since most journalist are fast readers and well acquainted with the web, you might consider writing more web based press releases, followed by the full article. A saw a great example a few days back on Slate.com: “how we read online“

Rutger, thanks very much for this interview! Your answers are published completely, but in the end, when I received all interviews, it will be integrated into a post that summarizes it all.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

We are an easy crowd. We even have our own social media site.

It turns into a different ball game when you talk to your clients and prospects. They don’t have the time, don’t have the knowledge and perhaps don’t even WANT to know what you have to say. But still, they need to be convinced and educated about the ‘SEO ways’ to turn a website into a success in the SERPs.

So how to do that? Below, I’ve written an example that explains the basic concept of title-tags (a.k.a. meta-titles), how to write them, and some common issues. My goal is not to teach you, valued fellow-SEO, about title-tags, but explain this concept as efficiently as possible to (imaginary) clients.

The story is based on the following ideas:

• start with a visual representation of the goal we want to reach. A graph going up usually does the trick;
• Keep It Simple, Stupid. Clients are NOT interested in theory. They want practical guidelines that actually work for them (‘what’s in it for me’);
• provide examples, examples, examples…

So, here is my ‘title-tags for dummies’ post. Please let me know if you think if it’s incomplete, too difficult, or anything else. Please read it through the eyes of someone who does not know what a title-tag is. Thanks!

Let’s get down to business.

What the bleep is a title-tag?

The title-tag is the most important text on a single webpage when it comes to SEO.

Writing good title-tags is essential for getting results in the search engines:

Does this grab your imagination? This is what happened a while ago with the website of a client of mine. I changed ONE title-tag on their homepage and their visits increased sixfold.

Of course, a lot can be said about this graph. You don’t know the statistics behind the graph, the text of the actual title, the subject of the site, and the competition. It’s just here to prove my point: it pays off to optimize title-tags.

When SEOs are talking about ‘title-tags’ or ‘meta-titles’, they refer to the clickable link text in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask:

Usually you’ll see the title-tag displayed in the blue upper part of your web browser:

But where you’ll ALWAYS find the title, is in the HTML source. It’s the text snippet in the top op the document between the codes <title> and </title>. (Ask your technician to show it if you don’t know).

Why are title-tags important?

The fact alone that search engines display this tiny bit of the text in their results pages, makes that they are important. This piece of text is your web site’s first impression, so you must make it interesting enough for ’searchers’ to visit. But there is more.

We (the SEOs) know that search engines value the text within the title-tag. If a single page is the Financial District in Manhattan, the title-tag is Wall Street. The words you put into a title-tag are very, very valuable.

The way I see it, is that the title-tag (and the meta-description, which is also shown in the search engines) is like an advertisement for a page, comparable to an Adwords ad. It should contain good keywords, but must also entice users to click. A title can only be ‘good’ when it displays both criteria.

How to write title-tags?

I could write a book about this.

But here is a summary of six practical guidelines you should remember. The title-tag:

• starts with the most important keyword;
• contains max. 65 characters (including spaces);
• and a call to action;
• branding names are (usually) mentioned in the end, or not at all;
• besides using keywords, a title tag must be compelling enough to click on;
• writing style depends on competition and goals (aiming towards CTR or ranking).

1. Start with the most important keyword

This tip is the most logical of them all. But that is probably why so many websites keep doing this wrong.

Start with the keyword you want to rank for with the webpage. But which keyword is that? Let’s just say that this keyword (or keyphrase) is unique for the page to which it belongs. All too often the mistake is made that pages try to rank for keywords that are too competitive, too general, or simply not relevant.

2: 65 characters

Why 65 characters?

Because this is (roughly) the amount of characters that are shown in the SERPs. Let’s look at the example of searchengineland.com. Their title-tag consists of 78 characters.

The title is longer than Google shows, because after ‘Marketing &Search’ we see that Google ends it.

This is not a problem. Google & co. will index it and even use the additional characters. You can make it 300 characters long if you want or need to. But it won’t be displayed.

However, keywords that are used in the beginning of the title weigh heavier. That’s why it is usually better to place your ‘ranking keywords’ in the beginning.

3: call-to-action

The ‘call-to-action’ is a request for the reader to act. In this case, to click the link on a search engine results page.

A very easy way to incorporate a call-to-action in a title is by inserting a question mark after the keyphrase:

'Title-tags for dummies?'

I’ve put ‘Title-tags’ first, because that is the best and official name of, well … title-tags :) The part ‘for dummies’ is not meant to rank, but is meant to provoke clicks. ‘How to explain…’ etc. is an actual description of what this article is about. I chose not to, but could have incorporated the synonym ‘meta-title’ somewhere as well.

4: put branding in the back

The homepages of strong brands usually don’t need many keywords:

But for us mere mortals it’s better to place keywords in our title. Even when it is the homepage, the center of our branding. (What keywords are and how to choose them is beyond the scope of this article.)

5: CTR: click through rate

Like I said before: the title is used to rank higher, but also to entice searchers to visit. This is what we also call ‘CTR improvement’. The higher the percentage of people that click (relative to the actual position in the SERPs) the better.

That is why you shouldn’t insert a lot of keywords into a meta-title without thinking about the effect this has on human readers.

6: Check out the competition

It doesn’t hurt to also check out the competition. Are the titles of competitors (in the search engines, not in real life) over optimized? Are they human readable? Spammy? Relevant for the page they refer to?

Knowing this might help to choose for a certain style of title-tag writing. You can stuff the titles with a lot of keywords to gain rankings or make them more enticing to improve CTR. It depends on the competition and the rankings you already have.

Feedback?

I would really like to receive feedback on this. Are the six tips I chose the most important ones, in your opinion? Are they explained the way they should and is it easily understandable? Just drop a comment and let me know :) Thanks!

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO