How to find a good title for a note
Robin Good is the pseudonym of an Italian online publisher and new media communication expert, Luigi Canali De Rossi, who writes several blogs about these subjects. Here are the links to his portal and to two spécialized blogs, “Sharewood Tidings (”What Communication Experts Need To Know”) and Kolabora (”Online Collaboration And Web Conferencing News Radar”). He recently published an excellent article about a rarely tackled problem, “How To Write Great Titles And Headlines For The Web.”
Robin starts his article by saying that the titles of an online article and a magazine story are two completely different beasts. On the Web, readers move from one site to another one, and you must be easily found. On the contrary, a magazine reader is almost prisoner and just browse from page to page.
Among the various suggestions from Robin to write a “good” title, here is my selection.
- your title must be short: “Three to six words is the ideal length, and at around ten the maximum limit. Major search engines give high relevance only to the first set of words you use in the title.”
- your title must “accurately describe the full content to be published.”
- finally, test your title by searching for it with Google: if AdSense ads appear in the results, and if they are relevant to the topic you’re writing about, chances are high that you’ve found a good title.
I just followed this advice by entering Robin’s title into Google (without quotes). Robin’s article is the #1 result , on a total of about 1,700,000 results. And there is one AdSense ad displayed. In other words, this is a good title.
I just used Google to check my own title and there is no AdSense ad appearing in the results: I guess that Robin’s title is better than mine :-)
