When generating content and balancing SEO principles, I often get asked, “Who am I writing for: human or search engines?” The answer, of course, is both. Without search engine traffic, no human gets the pleasure of reading your thoughts (yes, I know there are other sources of traffic). And, yet, if we only optimize for search engines, the results won’t always be pretty – or understandable – to humans. There has to be a balance between them.
From the article:
“What exactly you put into your title ultimately depends on what you decide is best — not what I personally think is best, not what John Gruber personally thinks is best. No one will know your site and your visitors better than you (assuming you’re a diligent publisher). Advice can be good, but advice from afar can also lack specific insight.”
“For example, keyword in title tags were found to be the fourth most important SEO factor in SEOmoz’s ranking factors survey in 2009. Google has written about the importance of titles on its Webmaster Central Blog. Google also offers an SEO Starter Guide. I’ll get back to more advice from it in a moment — as well as a link to it — but the guide says:
A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.
The tag tells users about the topic from a display perspective. It tells search engines from a relevancy ranking perspective. A descriptive title helps the search engine know what the page is about, which in turn can help the page rank for the key terms in the title.”
Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land does an excellent job of dissecting this topic. We couldn’t agree more!
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