The main purpose of an article’s title is to grab the attention of the reader. The title should be compelling enough to make the visitor read the entire post. As a site optimizer, this doubles up your task. You need to write an article title which is both search engine friendly and attention grabbing. If you lose the balance, you may rank well in the search engines, but due to a shabby title- no visitor will enter your site.

A title forms the first line of every search result and is the first thing a visitor sees about a website. In fact, many visitors enter the website upon reading the title and without so much of a glance towards the description.

Tips for Writing an SEO and reader friendly Web page Title:

• The title should not exceed 65 characters. A Major search engine like Google displays only 65 characters in the search result.  You may exceed the title, but take care to include all the important keywords in the front portion.

• Try and keep the title as a sentence rather than many short keywords. The visitor will find this more interesting.

• Separate phrases, keywords with a |.  Using a | works much better than a comma or semicolon.

• Include all the related keywords aesthetically into the title. I have come across so many search results wherein the title is stuffed with keywords. The reader will never get an idea about what the page exactly contains with such a title.

• Always write the title before the content. You will get a clear perspective of what you want to write about in the article. Writing an article without a title is like cooking without knowing what the end preparation will be.

• If you have to optimize an e-commerce site, do not enter the title for all the web pages manually. Set up a template for each category and ask the website programmer to embed it into the website. eg: For a book selling site where new authors and books are added everyday; the title can be:
  [Author Name] Books: [Book Title] [Year of Publishing]
  OR
  [Author Name] > [Book Title], [Year of Publishing] [Website Name].

  For a reviews / inner page -  Book Reviews: [Book Title] by [Author Name].
  Such a template will work for every web page of the website. This will save your time and effort. In future, if you want to change the titles, you simply have to give the template to the programmer and he/she will do the job for you.

• The most important of all: Ensure that your Title tag makes sense and reflects the content of the web page. Your title tag gets the visitor to enter the website and should deliver what it promises.