BPWrap - Latest Comments in Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Husqvarna — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:06:13 -0000

The limit on the meta description is really just to prevent your description looking too spammy. It should be short and concise to describe the page with a good variance of keywords.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Eva White — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:35:15 -0000

I was under the impression that meta description helps but I did not know the standard 155 characters or less also adds to the advantage. I changed my meta description as soon as I read the post and made it to exactly 151 words. Thanks Barry.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Web Template Fiend — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:35:30 -0000

Write for humans, and the keywords will follow. Don't think about keyword density or get too obsessive with keywords. Write compelling content and you will snag repeat visitors to your site. I've seen some awful content that's clearly written only with search engines in mind. I find that kind of thing very off-putting, and that site has lost me for good. You'll rank better if people link to you, and how do you get links if your content is shoddy? Keep it simple - concentrate on your audience and everything else will fall into place.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Dave @ E-tail — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:58:28 -0000

I think it's very important to get a good call to action inside your title. There's nothing more frustrating than to get a top 3 (thanks to a SEO written title) but no visitors or a lot of visitors but no conversions.

Another great Wp plugin to get custom titles, etc is the headspace plugin.

Dave

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Sharepoint Training Course — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:41:24 -0000

I am one who is definitely guilty of using All in One SEO plugin straight out of the box... I really need to go back into the settings and check what else it's capable of.

But I disagree with the notion of some comments of catering to search engines vs humans. I am coming straight from a corporate intranet background where my organization just wants to find files/pages. This SMM thing is completely new to me so I guess I need to get with the times. But I still contend that having zippy catchy titles won't help the audience find what they are looking for. They want that policy NOW!

I'm still of the belief this is the case for the Internet at large. You're catering to a specific readership with SMM but there's a bigger fish to catch with SEO.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Anthony — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:11:06 -0000

Good article. many write for the search engines these days and forget about the people.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Trailers — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:46:42 -0000

I have downloaded this recomended plugins. It is easy to use also for novice webmasters and the SEO of your blog will be mutch better.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

One Way Link Building — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:21:24 -0000

Good tips everyone. I think the overall sentiment is that you cannot go without SEO-All-In-One plugin! It simply provides more title and meta description flexibility if you choose to use it, even on a per post/page basis.

However, if a beginner does not want to deal with plugins in the beginning, he/she needs to take that extra minute to tweak the site title and tag in the settings->general menu, and then make the settings->permalinks to be custom structured to: /%postname%/

That's the bare minimum, and can go a long way to at least get the site's home page ranked decently if not in too competitive of a market. =)

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Tampa Gas Scooters — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:43:07 -0000

I employ a very similar strategy as Dave. It is a fine balance between catering to the engines, and making sure that your site is sticky enough for people to find what they are looking for if they decide to come back.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Dave Links — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:12:14 -0000

Right on. I normally try to craft the title tag for robots yet still makes some sense to humans, and similarly craft the headline for humans while still good enough for the robots and let that headline automatically end up in the url (via the permalink feature). However, it does make sense to make the page url more memorable, so perhaps from now on I will also try to shorten the page url name with quick edit before hitting the publish button.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Gina the Aflam Girl — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:49:41 -0000

Hi,
thanks for your great tutorial....i am happy and proud to announce i am using most of it already, also installed the SEO plugin and i am working on tweaking it for perfect results....merci. Gina.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

eibmoz — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:27:59 -0000

Very useful information.
One of my first mistakes was when adding new pages was i didnt change the description tags, so all pages had the same. Not long after these went into google's suplemental index.
The title and description tags are very important to both search engine and visitor.
Thanks!

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

edwin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:11:05 -0000

I fully agree, although making headlines which can humor humans as well as bots, is the key to succes.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Vic — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:05:10 -0000

I find that the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn is a must for every Wordpress install. I find it crazy how many times I see a Wordpress blog that is just a plain install with at most permalinks and no SEO enhancing plugins, when in fact one of the huge benefits of using software like wordpress is the availability of having a non technical user install plugins to upgrade their software.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Hank — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:23:27 -0000

Insightful article on a topic that seems to confuse many.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Barry Welford — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:30:41 -0000

Bob, I assume you mean allowing others to track-back to your post. In effect this is a back-link to use Google's term (Yahoo! calls it an inlink). Such links provided they're from authoritative websites are certainly useful in gaining higher Google rankings.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Bob — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:18:24 -0000

I get the title, description, etc. but do adding track backs help at all?

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Annie Maloney — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:55:21 -0000

Barry, Great article! Lots of good information. Its amazing how many times I still see "Home Page" as the title for a page. Many people are still using the same meta description by default on all their pages and unfortunatley, like greywolf said, there are still some CMSs that do not allow these fields to be edited or optimized. This is a good start and explanation for some on-site SEO that is easy to understand even for the most novice of bloggers/site creators.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Barry Welford — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:30:32 -0000

That's interesting, Charlotte. However I'll be looking into it to write my Titles rather than my Headlines. If I find it's created something memorable for humans too, then I'd use the same for both. Thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

charlottebabb — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:40:52 -0000

I've been using James Brausch's Glyphius to help me write headlines that search engines like. It lets me try different variations and scores them for effectiveness against its database. It even counts characters so I can optimize for Twitter or other short snippets.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Barry Welford — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:40:19 -0000

Thanks, Anita. You can't guarantee that Google will choose to use your 155 characters in its snippet, but when it does it certainly gives a more enticing entry.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Anita Campbell — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:27:47 -0000

Barry, Great article. Your advice about focusing on the first 155 characters is something I will be sharing with my team.

And there ya go! Another useful use for Twitter (with its 142 character limit) -- perfect way to practice getting to the point early.

Anita

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Barry Welford — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:06:29 -0000

I'm glad you like it, Ken. I'm enthusiastic about the ability of the plugin, particularly if you put the extra effort in for your more noteworthy posts.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

KenJones — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:16:54 -0000

Really useful post Barry. I've just started using WordPress with the all-in-one SEO plugin so thanks for providing the link to Katy's post as well, that'll really help to learn some of the finer points of using the pack.

Re: Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Barry Welford — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:38:12 -0000

Thank you, Michael. You're right and it's worth adding descriptions to that list since Google seems to find them important, even if they don't affect rankings.