7 Criteria of an Effective Page Title

Crafting an effective title is genuine art as it should aim at two main targets:

• to increase click-through (as this is the most prominent element of your site listing in SERPs);
• to achieve higher rankings (being the most important on-page factor when it comes down to Google).

Thus writing an effective title can’t be taken lightly; it is really difficult to craft a title that will both “help rankings and work in effect as a marketing message.” By just giving the list of page keywords, you are not going to achieve either of these aims.

Let’s look at some of the most important criteria that should be kept in mind when creating a good title:

• page title should be short and concise (unless you want it’s broken at the end);

• each page title should be unique and the unique part should go first (if a visitor keeps several tabs from the same open, he should clearly see what each tab is about);
• it should be catchy (to communicate an effective message);
• page title should conform to the page purpose (e.g. calling to action or informational);
• page title should be based on your keywords (for Googlebot to understand what the page is about);
• page title should be focused (don’t try to include all your keywords in the title the home page);
• page title should be semantically correct (Google is likely to apply some kind of semantic analysis to titles to make sure they are not spammy).

Chances are your titles do not all comply with all above criteria. However before you go back to your site to change its titles, keep in mind that this should be done really moderately and very carefully.

A global title change (applied to all or large number of pages) is most likely to trigger some kind of penalty (sudden Google referral traffic decrease). So my advice is: change 1 -2 titles and wait 2-3 weeks, then change other 1-2 titles, etc.