Writers and editors have to adopt a very different mindset when they set out to write headlines and titles that will attract search engine visits rather than catch the eye of a passerby at the newsstand or the book store. While clever headlines might sell newspapers, they won’t do much to attract the search engine user. That’s because search engines are very good at giving the user results that are related to their specific search query. A user interested in finding a job at Goldman Sachs is likely to type into a search box “Goldman Sachs jobs” or “Careers at Goldman Sachs.”
A professional writer or editor, on the other hand, has been trained to think of a clever, non cliched turn of phrase rather than the ultra prosaic “Jobs at Goldman Sach.” He or she might title an article about the rebound at Goldman Sachs like “Goldman Sachs Gold Rush is Back!” or something much more clever. The problem is is that the more clever the headline or title, the less likely it is that anyone might be searching on that specific phrase. After all, it’s clever because it’s unique, not because it’s obvious.
The search engines give great weight to the “title tag” when trying to figure out what the content of the page is about. The title tag is the content in the html source that appears between the <title>this is the title</title> in the <head> section at the top of the page. Although the title tag is invisible to users on the page, it appears in the blue horizontal row at the top of the browser. A good compromise for clever writers and editors is provide a <title> that matches what a user interested in the subject might type in a search engine. He or she can save that very clever turn of phrase for the title that actually appears on the page itself, usually in the form of a <h1> tag.
My advice to writers and editors who want to have their copy read by large numbers of internet users and who want to help their companies sell more advertising, is work closely with your webmaster or search marketing staff to find out what keywords or phrases that have been identified as important to building traffic to the site. Often, there will a relatively small list of, perhaps 50 or fewer words and phrases, that are highly relevant to the website but which are most frequently entered into search engines. These are the works and phrases that you want to see included in the title tags and even the <h> tags as well.
