When faced with a tricky title, like everyone in SEO will be at some point, I am often torn between wanting to be catchy and wanting to stick by the rules of search engine optimisation. On the one hand, a catchy title is likely to catch the eye of the Internet user who performed the search in the first place. On the other, without the correct keywords in the correct place (such as the title) the search engines are less likely to feature my title somewhere that the Internet user will actually see it when they perform the aforementioned search.
But then again, if I don’t have something catchy, the Internet user will click on someone else’s title… Ugh. Which is more important?
At such times, the decision of King Solomon comes to mind. The wise king of old was confronted by two women, both claiming to be the mother of a child. Faced with a very difficult choice, Solomon decided to cut things down the middle, so to speak, and when one of the women protested at the idea of cutting the child in half he knew he had found the real mother.
Okay, the decision the wise king faced was perhaps a little more serious than deciding whether to put one word before another in the title of an article on a website, but the analogy still stands.
Fitting your sometimes-clunky keywords into a catchy title is one of the harder SEO jobs, so you have to use your common sense. Sometimes, the keywords really do have to give way. At other times, the keywords are so important that a dry title is necessary. Sometimes, though, you really do have to split it down the middle – just watch out for wailing mothers.
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