Page Titles from Scratch

The other day I took a crack at crafting Page Titles for one of our SEO clients, and along the way realized that it was an interesting little bit of work.  Tweaking page titles when you’ve already got your page mostly SEO-d is one thing-and you can certainly always A/B test your changes, but what if you’re starting from scratch.  Then what?

Length parameters aside, what makes a good Page Title? Yes, you’ll want good quality keywords that are searched for, and yes, you’ll want keywords that are indicative of the content of the page.  But then what?  Do you include your brand/domain name or not?  At the front?  At the end?  Do you try to write ‘copy’ for your page title-like a brief sentence or do you construct your Page Title like a bread crumb-with a few, short descriptive phrases?  And, does any of this change if you’ve got to create 100 Page Titles versus 1000-or in many cases, 10,000?...

It’s enough to do your head in!  And, unless you’ve an automatic script that writes the Page Titles for you after scraping a page, let’s be honest:  you need a system that will allow you to quickly and consistently write them without having to spend 5 minutes crafting each and every one.  

So, as I was thinking about all of this the other day, I decided to take the ‘breadcrumb approach’ and also put the Brand Name at the front of the page title.  In my experience, for those more well-known brands, keeping the name at the front is often going to garner a few clicks-if for no other reason than Brand Familiarity, and at the very least is an easy way to give a visitor a quick sense of place before they click.

The new Page Titles I crafted will be live in short order.  I’m hoping we’ll get the green light from the client to actually test the effort, so if we do, I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, what’s your preferred approach for writing page titles?