You’ve spent time writing, designing pages, finding images, and inserting affiliate links into your new content. Affiliates know the importance of content investment and the value of targeted traffic. Are you spending enough time creating the right web page title? The reasons to spend extra effort on creating a good page title include: search engine spiders, visitor experience, keyword rich external links, and search engine rankings.

The art of creating a good web page title is like a balancing act. You are writing for two audiences: search engines (machines) and people. Search engine algorithms recognize the title tags in a web page as one of the most important ranking factors. The blue links you see in Google’s natural search results are usually the page title attributes. Web users read the blue links in the results and click on the link that best fits their needs. Check out the top search result below. Notice that the searched for keywords in the links appear in bold. Also, notice the keywords in the web page address appear in green.

Obviously, search engines are machines. Machines don’t understand humor, irony, or any other creative writing styles you learned in school. Search engines try to match up a search query with relevant keyword-targeted results. When you create your title it is important to consider the keywords and phrases web visitors will likely use. If there is a specific search you would want to target, than do a search for it and see what keywords other sites are using. There are a number of free and paid keyword research tools available online. My favorites are KeywordMax Keyword Builder, Google Adwords Keyword Tool and SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Search engine optimization experts know the importance of internal and external site links for search engine rankings. The web page title very often becomes the text by which other sites link to your content. Search engines see those links and the hyperlinked text pointing to your web page. The keywords in the hyperlinked text increase your chances of ranking in search results.

Many affiliates no longer hand edit the HTML of their web pages. It is now very easy and inexpensive to use database-driven content management systems. WordPress is the hugely popular, open source blogging software, used by many affiliates. This oneNetworkDirect Blog is powered by WordPress. Even though I am not hand editing the HTML of this page, it is still important for me to understand how the page title and other elements are automatically created for me. WordPress uses the headline of your post to create the page title, the web page address, the internal hyperlinks, and links for the RSS feed. That is a lot of information search engines can use to rank your content, and visitors can use to find your site. Placing your keywords and main idea in the headline is incredibly important to attracting targeted traffic. However, don’t overload it with keywords. Remember, it needs to be clear and concise for web visitors.

By Chris Felton
Senior Analyst, Strategic Marketing