by Gerard Coulombe

Created on: October 10, 2009

Website traffic: How to write titles that attract readers and search engines

Our title, Website traffic: How to write titles that attract readers and search engines, suggests that we should write titles that attract readers when we mean to say that we should write titles that make it easier for search engines to find those titles that people want to read. A search engine friendly title makes the search engine's task less difficult. However, a search engine, as smart as it is, cannot read a writer's mind even as it searches beyond the title for key words in the content zone.

All to say, that a title that is written specifically to take advantage of a search engine's special strengths on the world wide web is more likely to get a document, whatever it is, right up there at the head of the line to be read first. That is because the title that comes up first on the index of titles that pops up will be yours or the one a searcher wants to read.

The beauty of a search engine is a given. It performs much faster than an old fashion alphabetical index and much faster still than the Dewey Decimal system. That is the magic of a search engine. It is on the one hand easy to understand while it remains on the other hand truly magical.

Let's recalibrate. A search engine's job is to look for the key word followed by other key or complementary words in a title. It sends out a tool known as a spider to look at documents that are linked together by these key words as in a web. As the spider finds documents with these key words, it turns them over quickly to a smart indexer in the order designated by a set of rules known as an algorithm for selecting each title that falls in approximation to the query regarding the title being searched. [http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/search_engine.html

Linking several search engines together is like gathering many huge decks of cards together and then spending time examining each huge deck of cards all at once, selecting those probables that one might want to read because they fit the criteria and then getting each card arranged in line according to key words, including the ability of being able to jump from one engine to another when a new and better common link is found by that spider.

A successful writer of titles will construct his title with select key words that enhance the title by making it more searcher friendly, by framing a title that is greatly more extensive and specific. We are talking about multi-million entries down which

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