Me, Myself and I: 3 Ways To Title Your Posts
So I’ve decided to dust off CluelessAbout.com, and I thought it would be a perfect way to demonstrate the “Me, Myself and I” title optimization technique. Although I’ll be discussing it in the context of a WordPress blog, the technique can be used on any site, not just blogs.
Recently, I discussed the importance of titles for search engine optimization and proper ad selection. Getting the right words into the <title> tag of a page is an easy way to get a boost in search engine rankings. The key is to create a unique title for each page of your site, not just repeat the same title over and over again.
But you can actually go further. There are in fact THREE title elements to consider:
- The page title: the contents of the <title> tag;
- The page slug: the path of the page/post within the site; and
- The main heading: the topmost, biggest heading seen by the user (usually the first <h1> tag).
In most WordPress configurations all three title elements are essentially the same: the title of the blog post is the main heading, the page title (prefixed or suffixed with the blog name) and (slightly transformed) the page slug. But with a bit of work (not much!) you can make all three title elements different from each other, which can give some added “oomph” to your search engine optimization. Here’s how you do it.
Main Heading
The main heading is the post title. On the index and archive pages of your blog there will be multiple posts, but we’re mostly concerned with the permalink page for each post. See How can I avoid being banned from AdSense? for an example.
The only trick here is to make sure that the WordPress theme you’re using uses <h1> tags for the post titles. A lot of themes surround the blog title with <h1> tags and relegate post titles to <h2> or even <h3> tags. In fact, it should be the opposite — you could even argue that the blog title (and subtitle) shouldn’t even be in a heading tag, just normal text.
The main heading should always be created with the human reader in mind, because it’s usually the first thing they’ll see on the page.
Page Slug
By default, the page slug (the part of the page URL after the hostname) is derived from the post title. The algorithm is simple enough: all characters are lowercased, invalid characters are removed (not all printable characters are allowed in page URLs) and spaces are replaced with hyphens. Thus How can I avoid being banned from AdSense? normally transforms to how-can-i-avoid-being-banned-from-adsense.
But that’s the default behavior. You can use your own custom slug. On the right side of the post editor screen there’s a Post Slug section. Expand the section to reveal a text field and enter your custom slug value here:
What should you put in your custom slug? Anything you want! But you should keep it short and include a relevant keyword or two. An abbreviated form of your post title is a good choice. You can vary it by changing word order, excluding common words (like “and”), or by using synonyms and/or plurals. Don’t worry too much about making it human-friendly, it’s more the search engines that are going to look at it. The slug I chose for the AdSense banning post is adsense-ban-avoidance.
Page Title
The final title to worry about is the page title. The page title is the title that show up in the browser’s title bar. And it’s seen by both the humans and the search engines. Thus my post How can I avoid being banned from Google? has the page title Avoiding AdSense Banning.
To change the page title you need to install a WordPress plugin called SEO Title Tag. You have to make a small edit to your theme’s header.php file to activate it, but then you’re off to the races. Once it’s active, you’ll see a new “Title Tag” field show up in the post editor:
Just enter the custom title in that field and you’re done. (If you leave it blank, the default behavior applies.)
Note that it’s customary, but certainly not required, to use “title case” (capitalize most words) when writing titles. As with the slugs, keep them short and include a keyword or two.
What About Non-Blogs?
Everything I’ve mentioned here applies to non-blogs as well, except of course the way you specify the different title elements is different. But there’s no reason all three should be identical.
I hope this helps some of you get some better page rankings. It takes very little time and effort to come up with title variants but it can really pay off in the long run.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
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Comments
4 Responses to “Me, Myself and I: 3 Ways To Title Your Posts”
Hi, Eric,
I see you are now at v.1.2. Do we original license-holders need to do anything special to receive the upgrade? I am just preparing to use the application for my vre projects.
Maurice
sorry, just to be clear, I’m talking about PLRSiteBuilder.
Just got banned by AdSense for making too much money on Feb 19, 2008. All websites that we had were generic business websites and everything was legal. Google Adsense’s email indicated a ‘bad business model’. Our translation is ‘We are paying you too much money’. Go figure. We had been up and running for over a year until our websites were getting noticed by Alexa.com and Google AdSense’s mysterious partners.
You can appeal these kinds of decisions, especially if you provide proof that you weren’t doing anything wrong. And you can ask for more details.
Were you buying traffic and sending it directly to those pages? That’s one of the no-nos they usually refer to as a “bad business model”.
Eric