The Title Says It All
Writing for the web is different from any other medium. One important element of both print and web writing is the headline or title. Newspaper headlines are usually pretty catchy and are a tease to the story. Web titles do need the grab the readers’ attention as well, but there is another audience that will be taking notice of your title.
Search engine crawlers will be paying close attention to a work’s title. The title is made with special header html tags that signal to crawlers that this is something important. It is important to use keywords or good keyword phrases for search engine rankings in your title. It will be a search engine friendly title that can in return help readers find your post.
I love to write witty titles but that doesn’t help my search engine placement. I might like the title, ‘Hotel heiress lands in the slammer,’ but probably no one is going to search for that term. They are more likely to search for, ‘Paris Hilton goes to jail.’
The title of your web page is also important when it comes to web crawlers. Again, the title tag located in the header gives important information as to what kind of content can be found on that page. The title page text shows up at the very top of the web browser. Sometimes I use a web page for a template for another one, and the title is often a tag that I forget to change. When I check the pages online, I usually notice the title since it’s displayed so prominently.
It is a good idea to check your titles to ensure that they accurately describe the web page and to give your blog postings titles that are search engine friendly.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
What’s your take on subtitles, Lynn? Should they also be optimized, or can you use a bit of creative license here and add something witty?
June 15th, 2007 at 1:19 am
I would say have fun with subtitles. Let your title help to bring in readers and let your writing style help to keep them.
June 15th, 2007 at 4:34 am
Good tip … I am bad bad at writing witty headlines and often stress about it, so it is good to know that my matter-of-fact headlines may be useful after all!