The famous blogger Steve Pavlina said in the article "How to Make Money from Blogging": Only 1% of people have the potential to make money from blogging, and this potential is reflected in the title of the article. Steve Pavlina is one of the few master bloggers in the world. His Steve Pavlina.com achieved an income of US$1,000 per day in 2006. We don’t have to doubt his confidence in expressing this opinion - experience tells him that writing well A webpage title is more important than anything else!
The title of a web page, or Title, is one of the most important factors that search engines value when ranking web pages, and is the top priority of SEO. Therefore, countless people have conducted in-depth and extensive research and practice on the design and optimization of Title, and have come up with some practical rules. For example, the frequency and ordering of keywords in the title, the number of words in the title, the use of separators, etc.
These laws indeed provide us with some ideas in practical operations, and can achieve good results.
However, it is easy for us to forget that the ultimate goal of SEO is not search engines, but users. If you blindly optimize titles according to search engine ranking rules, you will violate the fundamental law of website construction: design your content for users rather than search engines - this is repeatedly emphasized in Google's "Webmaster Guidelines". Once you get lost and enter into the misunderstanding of designing titles for "machines", the consequences will be disastrous. It may be effective in the short term, but in the long run, your rankings will eventually be replaced by websites that are reasonably optimized for visitors.
What is the difference between title optimization for users and search engines?
When facing users, what you think about is what users need, what words or phrases they are interested in, how to make them understand the title and have the urge to click, and does the title give an unbiased summary of the content? Using these ideas as a starting point, Only then will a suitable keyword strategy be formulated, and then the title will be systematically optimized based on ranking rules.
For search engines, what do you think of is the target keyword, how many times to repeat it, and how to place the keyword? The result of this is that the title is likely to be a bunch of repeated descriptions, which is not readable and ignores the user's needs. Attention... failed.
Maybe you think that rankings are a matter of search engines and don’t care what users think? Then you are wrong. Search engines listen to users. After your ranking enters the first few pages, the user's clicking behavior directly determines your subsequent ranking - just like voting.
Of course, in actual operation, no one will be so rigid and completely ignore the user's thoughts. Here is just a reminder: Think from the user's perspective and you can write the best title.
Being user-oriented is actually very simple, because the purpose is to design a friendly title, and we almost don’t have to consider the temper of search engines. As mentioned above, just note these few points:
User needs
user's attention
Title semantics/readability
The general nature of the title
User needs. This should actually be determined before content production, and it is also the most difficult to grasp. It requires empathy and even in-depth market research. For example, we see that "Texas Hold'em" is very popular now. If you want to build a website, you must first think about what users want to do with Texas Hold'em. Do they want to understand the rules of the game, watch event news, or play games? Is it for real money or for free? There are many kinds of guesses, it’s impossible to do them all, right? Determining user needs actually determines the main body of the web page title. Here, suppose we think that users want to play free Texas Hold'em online games and decide to build an online gaming website. Regarding the demand analysis of Texas Hold'em Poker, please refer to a case I wrote: Texas Hold'em Poker Case - Do you understand the user's needs?
user's attention. When the content of the website is similar to that of competitors, we need to consider where users’ attention is focused—that is, which words users are more sensitive to. There are 5 websites that provide the same Texas Hold'em online game. Should we just write the same title? No, there must be outstanding highlights to attract users' attention. Here we want to analyze what users are most concerned about when playing poker games: server speed? Number of people online? Promotional activities? Player quality (handsome guys, beautiful women, rich people)? Assuming that after an hour of investigation, we found that the game speeds of each website are equivalent, and Players care more about the number of people online and beauties; well, in our title, we must highlight the large number of people online and the beauty.
Title semantics/readability. We have already determined the main body and prominent points of the title. Now we need to form them into a coherent and smooth phrase, and it must be beautiful in form and rhythm, so as to attract visitors to the greatest extent. We wrote this: "Texas Poker Game - One Hundred Thousand Beauties Online", are you tempted?
Note: If there are too many keywords that need to be highlighted, for the sake of simplicity in the title, we can put the secondary information in the Description tag.
The general nature of the title. Don’t blatantly deceive users! In general, it’s best to ensure that the title matches the content. Especially for content-based web pages, if you write a title that is irrelevant to the content or is exaggerated in order to be clicked, while the deceived visitors will angrily close the page, you will also lose the trust of search engines. But in this case, we appropriately exaggerated, which is an effective marketing strategy - difficult for users to see through.
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