You’ve probably heard it time and time again—the title of your article is critical to the success it gains on the web. Ignoring the importance of that title can be very detrimental to your writing—after all the majority of readers determine whether or not they will read your article based on the title, and the search engines will not be able to accurately identify your site’s subject matter, hindering the flow of traffic. Those who work at larger newspapers are well aware that titles of the newspaper articles are considered so extremely important that there is often a title editor on the job.

This person’s sole function is to constantly come up with compelling, interesting and enticing headlines for the stories run by the newspaper. As readers have less and less actual time to read an article which catches their eye, they turn to skimming to determine whether the information they need or want is contained within a specific article. If you are a newspaper reader, you likely look at the front page, skimming the headlines to determine what you want to read, then continue through the paper from page to page, skimming headlines and stopping occasionally to actually read through an article.

Words That Draw Your Reader’s Attention

There are specific words which will naturally draw the eye of your reader—the most common, of course, being “sex.” Obviously unless you are actually writing about sex you can’t just throw the word in randomly in order to get readers. There are other words considered “high engagement” words however it’s important not to overuse them. Readers will quickly recognize they are being manipulated rather than being able to clearly see what the ensuing article is really about. If you are writing for a specific genre, such as the art world, including words such as gallery and exhibit can draw your reader’s eyes quickly to your article, giving them a hint of something they want to read about. Keywords should be used in your titles, but only in a natural manner, not in an obviously contrived way.

Titles Geared Toward Search Engines

In addition to having a good idea of what words human beings will look for when writing your titles you will also need to know the words search engines rely on. For instance if humans typically type in “backache” rather than “back ache,” then you will want to use the former in your titles to ensure they can be found by the search engines. Additionally, the search engines rely heavily on article titles in order to determine what the content is about, so the title is indeed, crucial. Every page in your site should have a unique title which clearly describes the content on the page rather than the overall site.

Title Tags

So you understand the process for writing a title for each page, now think about your title tags. In terms of search optimization, the single most important sentence you will write for your website will be the title tag for your primary website page. The title tag tells the search engine what the page is all about, and, in the case of your primary page, what your website is about. Your primary keywords or keyword phrases should appear in the title tag with the most important words appearing near the beginning of the sentence. Most guidelines state that you should limit the characters in your title tag to 70, and although only the first 70 characters will show in the top bar of the browser, search engine robots can read the remainder and there is no penalty for going over that number of characters. Think of your titles and title tags as the gateway to your compelling content—if neither humans nor search engines want to open that gate, then the rest of your content will never be seen.