Follow those simple suggestions to improve your website page titles in 5 minutes.

Start with…

Use your Google Adwords learnings

1. Pay Per Click advertising programs which offer ad variations are an excellent platform to test the effectives or the likelihood of your organic listing getting higher click rates. Make sure to target the right keywords for each page, place them at the start of the page title and copy the best performing ad from your campaign in terms of CTR and conversions. In the below example, you can safely assume that ‘Double Sided Photo Paper From £10 & Quick Delivery atExampleSite.com‘ would get  more clicks than ‘Double Sided Photo Paper For HP & Canon at ExampleSite.com

Make it optimise for humans

1. Avoid using buzz words, use plain English everyone can understand and ensure it reads well
2. Just like in the title of a book or magazine, the first letter of each word should be capitalized

Less is sometime more

1. Make sure page title has enough information together with a call to action, but doesn’t look too busy
2. Try cutting the page title off early and add “…” at the end of the title. This triggers a response in a lot of users, assuming there is more relevant information on the page. Curiosity hasn’t killed the cat, just increased your CTR

Lead potential visitors to make the desired action

1. When the goal of the page is to get leads by signing up, consider adding a short call to action at the end of the title, for example “Sign up for free!”
2. When the goal of the page is to create conversions consider adding a short call to action at the end of the title, for example “Free shipping!”
3. Finally, for sales or clearance pages consider adding a short call to action to create a sense of urgency, for example “hurry, limited stock!”

Optimise the page title for one term

1. The page title should only describe that particular page
2. If you must use more than one term to describe the page, the ordering of keywords in the title is important. Start from the most to the least important and  avoid keyword stuffing.

There you have it, 5 minute work.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.