16 Jun Shorter Titles for Your Blogs and Articles
When doing your keyword research for your articles and blogs you are likely to find that many options come up that don’t quite sound right. For instance if you have a website selling ‘flowers in Boston’ then you might find that the ‘done thing’ is to title your pages as ‘Flowers Boston’ as those are the two important ‘keywords’ and such a title won’t waste space with useless words such as ‘in’. Many web gurus suggest just this and say that there’s no need to include these conjunctions which only waste space and don’t give you any more ‘search engine juice’.
But is this wise? Or is this another case of the SEO community putting their priorities in the wrong place?
Shorter Titles Blogs Articles
Google does search for words like ‘in’ and ‘of’ now and they will be included in your search. However it’s not that likely to alter what comes up, because well… almost every website has ‘in’ in it somewhere. You’re hardly going to rank for ‘in’ so what’s the point of including it at all? At the same time many people who are in a hurry and who understand how Google works will simply just type those words they’re looking for in order to save time, so again is it really necessary to mimic the way we’d say it just because it feels right?
Well while excluding ‘in’ and ‘of’ might save us real estate, it does so at a price – and that price is intuitiveness.
Why Sometimes a Longer Title Also Can Have Advantages Worthy of Your Attention
You see when someone who isn’t in a rush, or who doesn’t know the functioning of Google quite so well types in a query they tend to make it sound more like speech – simply because that’s what they’re used to doing. If you’ve ever checked your web stats then you’ll know some people still type full-blown questions into Google that go something like: ‘excuse me please, but where can I find good flowers?’.
In this case these people are far more likely to type the full phrase of your title, and you’re more likely to get a hit if that’s the title of your web page. Furthermore though, when all the results come up in Google and someone sees one that sounds like actual English, and like a person wrote it, they are far more likely to want to click it. Which would you rather click ‘flowers cheap Boston’, or ‘Very cheap flowers in Boston’. The second is more trustworthy sounding, it’s more natural and it catches the eye much better too.
Phrasing Is Everything
As usual then it’s a mistake to write and code entirely for Google. You also need to think about the user and what they’d appreciate. Meanwhile it’s a mistake only to write for people like you – because there’s a huge demographic of elderly out there and others who are less computer literate. Finally as time goes on, Google is only going to get better and better at finding the sites that speak like humans and those that have tried too hard to flirt with Google’s spiders will fall by the wayside.
Alfred Batts is an active blogger and gives expert advices on how to promote your search engine ranking, seo link building services and traffic ranking.
