Brian Clark has some excellent ideas for writing effective titles in his blog copyblogger. He has recently re-written headlines submitted by his readers along with a rationale for the changes. It’s a good way of demonstrating what works.

At the core of his recommendations is the need to use the title to clearly communicate the value of the content to the reader. There are some tried and tested techniques for this such as:

• “10 ways to ……”,
• “How to (do xyz) and get (some benefit)
• “What you need to know about (xyz)”

If you are optimising a page for the search engines the title is important because having keywords in the page title is one of the most important factors contributing to ranking well for those keywords.

So, should you optimise for the search engines by making sure the title contains keywords, or should you make the title persuasive so that the reader is motivated to click through and read the rest of the post or article?

There’s no reason why you can’t have both of course. A title can be both persuasive and contain keywords. That’s always going to be the best result. I would always make sure that consideration is given to keywords in the title for the following reasons:

1. Using keywords will get more targeted traffic than people clicking a clever headline out of curiosity. Untargeted traffic doesn’t have as much value.

2. If one of the goals is to get your article republished, publishers will search article directories for relevant content using keywords.

3. The titles of most interest to your target audience are the ones that have relevance to them. Keywords are exactly that – words that have relevance for your target audience. If you don’t include the keywords the headline is less likely to stand out when someone scans a page.

I analyse a large number of accommodation websites due to the fact that:

• I live and work in a popular tourist area on the Sunshine Coast. Property managers regularly tell me about their website problems

• I monitor the web stats for the local chamber of commerce using Google Analytics. This gives me an insight into cases where people end up on the general tourism site when really I would have expected them to go straight to a hotel’s own website. For example when someone has searched for a hotel by name. When I investigate it’s invariably because the hotel’s own website is difficult or impossible to find.

Here are some common reasons that account for the low visibility of a website in the search engine pages:

1. The website can’t be indexed so the search engines are unaware of it. I’ve come across several instances lately where a metatag has been added to the website excluding visits from the search engines. I did some work for a holiday resort recently that has had a robots noindex tag for the last 3 years ever since the website was developed. That’s 3 years where they’ve had absolutely no presence at all when someone searches for them or their product.
2. There are other technical problems preventing indexing such as flash entry screens or javascript menus. The search engines are getting better at indexing pages such as these but there are still many cases where it causes a problem.
3. Websites have had dodgy seo work done on them in the past. The most common one I see is multiple domains all containing duplicate copies of the website.
4. The website content is pulled from other sources that already rank well for the major keywords. This is very common in the tourist industry as the easiest option is to grab a piece of promotional blurb that already exists elsewhere. However Google will only show one occurrence of content so don’t expect your website to show for those keywords if you don’t have original content.
5. The essential basics for search engine optimisation haven’t been covered. Relevant, well thought out page titles make the biggest difference to ranking well.
6. The website isn’t old enough to rank for any competitive phrases. It takes about 9-12 months for this to happen so patience is required combined with other marketing initiatives such as Google adWords.

If you have a website and can’t understand why it is hard to find through Google or other search engines contact me and I’ll take a look. Any other comments on common problems will be very welcome here as well.