You may think that having a catchy string of words is the primary function of the title of any piece you are using for web content creation. The truth is, a catchy, well-crafted title will do far more than that  if given half a chance! There needs to be some thought put behind the choices made here, so let’s take a quick look at how your titles can work for you!

Whether you are doing some article marketing, blog posts, Social Media marketing or anything else to be published on the web, there are several best practices to keep in mind when crafting your copy. Here are 8 quick tips for making your titles not only stand out, but work for you!

1. Use Keywords -  Use your keywords in the title, preferably near the beginning. This will ensure that your keywords will be in the title tag, and thus helping your page to be found for that term.
2. Be Specific – Search engines, particularly Google, prize the title tag. It is considered to be a major ranking factor for your page, so you want it to be not only relevant to the content on the page, but keyword driven and engaging as well. Conversely, pages that obscure the content on the page by using titles that are too cryptic or intentionally using linkbait to drive news driven traffic to offers are eventually weeded out, and will not rank long term.
3. Be Relevant – Keeping your page titles relevant is even more valuable now as RSS feed aggregators, directories, search engines and more use them as listings, headings and bookmarks for your page. This can help you in your organic rankings as well.
4. Keep It Short –   Many times your titles are truncated after 64 characters, including spaces. Don’t go over that limit unless you don’t mind the rest of the title sometimes being missing!
5. Be Plain Spoken - Talk to your readers plainly, and don’t use high falutin’ language in an attempt to make your content more “scholarly” than it really is. This puts people off, and the headline skimmers likely won’t read any further.
6. Call To Action - If possible, include a call to action within your title, exhorting your reader to read on about the benefits of taking your content to heart!
7. Don’t Use Stop Words -  Stop words are words like “and”, “the”, “a” or “an”. Search engines don’t read them, and it’s better sometimes to use a dash (-) instead. This also saves on character space.
8. Don’t Keyword Stuff - Okay, I did say that you needed keywords in your title; but I didn’t say you needed them all in there! There is really no need to do this. Using your primary keyword, and perhaps one secondary if it fits is plenty.

Optimizing your titles in this fashion should make your pages rank better for the keywords you are going after, and make a better reading experience for your visitors!