December 29, 2007 07:06
Category: Optimizing
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Thank heavens I can afford not to do justice to my site for 2 months, yet make just about enough to keep the hearth burning. I depend on the Internet to earn my living, and though it has come a long way since the debut, people can hope to make money here in more ways than ever, and this trend is likely to get stronger.
But pray wonder what has that got with keyword in page title?
Well, the point is, as the net has grown, so has competition. And for me, as someone who writes web content, it's clear that there has to be more in what I do in order to get noticed.
When I talk of keyword in page title of a webpage as mandatory, I find myself transported to the time when the going was a lot easy.
Time was, when we were not as interconnected as we are today, the fear was occasional that someone from the other side of the planet would float in and take a dig at my expertise.
Life then was much predictable. But not any longer.
Earlier, as a copywriter, when my service was hired say for a webpage that could be a marketing article or a press release or something else, I would often write only the main body of a piece and leave the page title and other detailing to my client.
My clients felt it didn't matter much if the page title lacked the verve, or if keyword in page title would have improved things, and were happy as long as the main text served their immediate need.
Today, with the result-oriented push of the Internet I can feel down my neck the breathing of a copywriter sitting thousand miles away. I've come to realize that if I slip up in my writing, my client can move off to my competitor before even I bat my eyelid.
This has meant that while the urge to write better has increased, so have the ways to make a content stand out in the crowd of many.
In other words, when I write web content now, I do it knowing that if on one hand I have the opportunity of reaching out to countless readers all over the globe, on the other I run the risk of competing against thousands of writers spread globally doing the same thing as I am.
To tell it simply, there are both the opportunity and the chance of failing, residing side by side in today's networked world. The challenge for me is therefore to write in such a way that I can invite the attention of more readers than what my competitors can.
As you've rightly guessed, one technique that has stood the test of the time is to have the keyword in page title of a web topic, and further making it so endearing that it immediately captures the readers' attention.
But this is easier said than done. Why? Let me explain.
One of the ways the readers can find my content is by doing searches on the search engines. The group of words they type in the search box before clicking the button 'Search' is commonly called a key-phrase or keyword(s).
When the search engines display the results, usually the pages that come on top have the chosen keyword in the page title. There are other solid reasons for the pages to come on top, but to have the keyword in page title is surely one of the clinchers.
The onus is therefore on writing a page title that not only has the chosen keyword in it, but also is captivating and able to convey a sense of benefit to the readers should they want to read the content.
What however happens is that copywriters often misconstrue this and use the keyword in page title more as a weapon to rank high in search results. Nothing wrong here per se, but I believe it's not the right way to look at it.
The reason why you must have keyword in page title is because it benefits your readers. At a first glanced it helps them understand what lies ahead when they decide to read the page content.
It's another matter that the search engines too seem to accord priority to the pages that have keywords in the page title. And yes, optimizing a page intelligently with one or two keywords also helps matters.
After all, the engines are there to make life easy for surfers, don't you think?
All the top search results have the keyword 'search engine optimization' in the page title
