Best way to attract clicks to your title on search results?

Hi everyone!

Does anyone have any references to market research, pyschology, or personal experience, comments, anything, in terms of what types of title tags attract the most clicks when you come up on the search results?

For instance, on some search results I see lots of fancy characters --- sometimes I can imagine these would be pretty effective, but some just look ugly and probably deter rather than attract.

Would be interested to see if any of you have played around with this...

Thanks!

So what you are saying, is how the title looks visually to the person seeing it in the Search Engine, and if any visual cues of the title (like special characters) make any significance in the chance of it being clicked, other than the simple ranking in those search engine results.

I do not have any reference, but I am sure the ranking of the listing makes a huge impact on how many get clicked. Now if special characters in the title improve any chance of getting clicked, I am not sure. I doubt that by using special characters that you will get listed any higher, but it may draw more visitors if its stands out in comparison to the other listins in the results.

Yes, I'm talking solely about how the title looks. I know that some special characters do attract attention (they attract mine), so I was wondering if there are any negative side-effects (i.e., it attracts attention, but doesn't make the user want to click it for some other reason).

I'm trying out some special characters for titles on a few of my top results, I'll keep you lot posted if I find anything interesting.

I don't think that adding special characters around your title text such as (¯`·._.·Keyword·._.·´¯) will help you either in rankings or in clickthrough.

If you do a search for a highly competitive term, such as 'search engine optimization', you won't find stuff like that. So from a ranking point of view I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

As for clickthrough, I haven't seen any pyschology results, but in my searching, I notice those title, but usually ignore them and click elsewhere.

I love the people who figured out how to put starts in their title tag, i always click on those

anyone know how to do that? I find that very interesting.

I think that some special characters don't display correctly for search results pages on some computers/browsers. At least in my experience, rather than the special character being displayed, there's a question mark or a rectangle that gets display instead, which looks pretty bad.

What I am specifically talking about is when I do a search for some popular key word, and I see a site that has STARS in their title tags or something really cool like some kind of character design. I always click on those first.

Can someone explain to me how to put STARS in your title tags?

Thanks,

You can post a star with a code similar to this into your html file:

Ӓ

Although right now I don't know the actual number required (off the top of my head, I think it is 7000-something, not that it helps).

It won't display properly all the time in all browsers and search results.

if you want a star that bad, put in an *

I normally click on names that have what I am looking for directly in the title

If you see a title that you like with a special character, you should be able to look at the site's source and see what they have added to make that character.

I have done it before in the past, but sometimes the character would come up, sometimes a "?" or a lil box would come up. You should just focus on a great statement in the title that brings the searcher in.

Personal habits are different from page ranking algorithms. I look for clear titles related to my search that do not have gimmicky characters or otherwise look desperate to attract a hit. This habit has increased my odds of finding a needle rather than a fistful of hay.

Pages I create use titles that are in an active voice, concise, contain strong subject-oriented language and try to squeeze in acronyms if they are very specific.

One look at Google search results and its clear that <title> tags are not a major player in relevancy. Use the title tag for what its for: to identify the page content as clearly as possible. Remember: you may be #1 in search results, but users still have to click!

Yeah, I would never put a title like "Widgets, widgets, widgets, widgets here!" You want to focus on your keywords, but make it inviting for the customer.