Writing a Great Web Page Title Using Science

There isn’t much information about writing a great web page title for Internet business profitability out there. So we thought we would dive into the data and give you some tips.

The title is what is shown for your page in the browser title bar. Some browsers show a very short snippet. Others show a longer line. In any case, you can’t really guarantee that more than 50-100 characters will be shown.

Does the title even matter? Should it be optimized for SEO or profits? Many think that the title doesn’t matter very much for sales so they focus on using the title for better search engine rankings. We never take that tact. Internet business is about profits. We optimize for profits, not the search engines. Although… often optimizing for profits does involve the search engines.

So the first step is to keep your title short. Successful sites average a 52 character title. The control group averages a 72 character title. Shorter titles are more profitable.

The second step is to use the right punctuation. Punctuation matters in a title (as it does almost everywhere). Here are some good punctuation characters to use:

| (vertical bar)
. (period)
- (dash)
@ (at)
& (ampersand)
: (colon)
, (comma)

Here are some to avoid:

# (number sign)
$ (dollar sign)
+ (plus sign)
; (semi-colin)
‘ (single quote)

Other punctuation is more neutral according to our data.

Capitalization is also important. Successful titles are most apt to use mixed case. A successful title looks like this:

Writing a Great Web Page Title Using Science

It does NOT look like this:

WRITING A GREAT WEB PAGE TITLE USING SCIENCE
writing a great web page title using science

The words used differ a great deal from keyword to keyword and market to market, but there are some good words that show up in the data universally. They include:

trading
search
engine
advertising
of
reviews
online
and

And words to avoid:

optimization
the
for
cheap
flights
tickets

No. We don’t have any idea why some punctuation or words would be better or worse than others. We just know that they are from looking at the actual data from profitable and unprofitable web-sites.

Obviously it might be difficult to work in “search”, “engine” or “advertising” if you sell cat collars. That’s OK. Use what you can. Don’t force words where they don’t belong. That won’t work.

If you want us to use the keyword specific data to rewrite your landing page, we would be happy to help you. You can order our service here:

Landing Page Rewrite Service

Contact us after you place your order and give us the keyword you used in your PPC or other campaign pointing at that landing page. We’ll use that specific data to get you a guaranteed winning title (and optimize the rest of your landing page for profits too!)