With an unprecedented amount of content on the internet today, creating something that stands out and grabs attention is challenging. With countless others competing for the same attention, you may only get one shot to make a good impression on a person before losing them forever to a competitor. As such, first impressions truly do matter.

In most cases, the first thing a person is going to notice about your page or post is its title. Whether shared on social media or found via search, these titles can have a huge impact on how people see your content – and whether they click on it at all. To help you out, we’ll look at how you can be sure to create the best page and post titles for your content.

Consider Both Users and Machines

When cultivating the best page and post titles, it’s important to remember that you’re optimizing for two different audiences: search engines and users. While search engines try to optimize their algorithms to favor what users would prefer, it is not always this simple. As such, creating post and page titles requires both a creative approach in terms of wording and a technical approach in terms of tags and descriptions.

Pinging URLs with optimized titles to search engines can ensure that search engine algorithms rank your content properly, but you’re also wanting to create titles that lure people in to know more. While they often line up in terms of commonality, there are some differences, so be aware.

Optimize Your Title Lengths

Another factor that must be considered in creating optimized titles is the length. Ultimately, this can vary depending on which mediums you’re targeting, but most people optimize specifically for search engines. For Google, for example, the limit is 60 characters: this may sound like a lot, but it’s not: you’ll have to truly work to come up with the best titles that provide the most information in as few words as possible.

This is a huge reason why people favor action words and descriptors when targeting search engines. While clickbait titles can actually improve clickthrough rates on social media, they tend to not provide the same value via search – and because the titles tend to be vague, search engines don’t rank them highly. As such, be very considerate of which platform you’re targeting with each piece of content, and optimize accordingly.

Build Brand Value

With limited real estate in each title (at least in terms of visibility on search engines and social media), optimizing what you’ll include is crucial. One element that may take up some space – but can nevertheless help build your brand – is your brand itself. By including your website or company name in each title, you indicate to readers exactly who is responsible for the content before they click.

Additionally, evidence has been shown that search engines like to see this element in titles, and may even truncate your existing post titles in search results in order to identify your brand in the title itself. As such, it is much better to have control over where – and how – your brand name is pinging URLs in search and social media.

Seeing as how page and post titles are often the first thing a reader will see, you want to make a good impression. By including your brand, optimizing length and factoring in how much readers and algorithms view each title, you can optimize this crucial element of every page for maximum effect.