#probably really needs a redbull.

[insufferablemonsters]

well guys, i have some news for y’all! i am… pregnant!!! 🥰💜 my bf and i have been trying so this is very happy news! so if y’all wondered why i haven’t been on here, it’s because i’ve been dealing with sickness while working😭 just learning to navigate everything!

[kichona-s]

Hereby requesting facial structure rant

ok for those who dont know this is reference to my post where i cry about george's beautiful fucking face at 2am

this is pretty fucking specific and also pretty long so i wont clog your tl with it so its under the cut

OK FOR GEORGE. Personality and everything else aside he has my most favourite face out of the entire grid (sorry guanyu) BECAUSE. LOOK AT HIM. THERE SO MANY NICE ANGLES AND ITS SO NICE AN LONG AND HIS CHEEKBONES??? THE JAW??? his nose also fits his face really nicely ok but the key is to not look at him head-on you need to get the side profiles and the 3/4 views because FUCK. i love so much theres so many points of interest for his face also his chin juts out really strong which looks lowkey kinda funny in some pictures but it really adds to the whole angleley bony face structure he has going on anyway. george my number 1 fav face the only thing im not a big fan of are his ears rip theyre too round for the whole angular coherency BUT THATS FINE IDC

MOVING ON TO MAX VERSTAPPEN (this is not done in a ranking order btw i havent drawn the whole grid so i cant properly rank everyone) ok like im gonna be real with yall. i thought he was fucking ugly as shit when i first got into f1. like i looked at his photo and was like ??? ig he wins a lot lmao OK BUT THEN LIKE A FEW MONTHS AGO I KEPT GETTING MAX STUFF ON MY TIKTOK FYP AND I WAS LIKE. HOLD ON. HIS PERSONALITY KINDA CUTE ASF. ok yea basically i gaslit myself into loving his face (either that or charles possessed me). for max im way too drawn to his lips (@loquarocoeur bro u know this lmfao) and ngl anyone who read the notes in my face breakdown u could probably tell but i love his lips??? so much??? gonna keep it pg here but he should suck on more things other than the twisty redbull can straw things

still on max but i really like how fucking square his face is. its so refreshing to draw. also did you notice that he has a small ass forehead?? bc he does. he looks wrong when i draw his forehead too big its kinda funny (looking at YOU oscar). i also really like his ear shape? it bends pretty low so it looks kinda cute and i try to make sure i draw it properly lmfao. special note to when hes looking down but then his eyes look up and holy smokes it brings out his nose bridge and the eyebrow bone thing SO WELL???!! anyway i want to eat him

for oscar uh. his face is oval? i guess?? after all the oscars ive drawn youd think i have more to say but i dont :( his face is pretty and also sometimes a pain to get right but other than that nothing too much for me to rant about. OK BUT HIS HAIR??? LOVE HIS HAIR I LOVE THE FUCKING SWOOPY THING IT DOES (it also makes my life WAYYY easier bc i can just draw the swoop and most people know its oscar yay for good character design). also everyone is right he does look like a cat. a cat with a massive fucking forehead. also whenever i draw him i remember that hes only three years older than me and its pretty scary ngl! thats hitting a bit too close to home for my taste! hes cute though and ive definitely drawn some banger oscars so one love

NOW FOR LANDO WHOOOOIMABOUTAMAKEANAMEFORMYSELFHERE! ok firstly his face is like a V so i always need to remind myself to bring the sides of his face in more compared to oscar. also did you know his eyes are a bit lopsided? theyre on different parallel lines im telling you go look at the 2023 official driver photos its So Bad i want to cry (that was also my first introduction to him so. i thought he was fucking ugly too). his face is really interesting to draw especially with his eyebrows that fade in and out and are really fucking bushy in the middle LMAO. do i love his face? nah. is it fun to draw? yea pretty fucking fun ESPECIALLY because he somehow suits all the funny shit i wanna put him in like dresses and skirts and bikinis (and also @cx-boxbox is an enabler istg half of the landos ive drawn probably wouldnt exist without her) also his ears look pointy from certain angles and i think thats really cute so i always draw them pointy :))

for charles uh i dont like drawing his hair its a pain. nice face i guess

LASTLY MY ONE AND ONLY!! THE MAN WHO BREAKS ME OUT OF ARTBLOCK REPEATEDLY!!!! ZHOU GUANYU!!!!!!! he's just very cute to me i love his stupid fucking eyebags AND ALSO THE WAY HE SMILES IS ADORABLE I WANNA PASS OUT :(((((( i dont draw his non-chibi version as much bc whenever i do i feel the need to make him Perfect (because hes my fav yknow) so i tend to just. not do it. unless i need to cure my artblock then i draw him so idk hes like my pc reset button. anyway i love zhou and i love looking at pictures of zhou and if he doesnt get a seat next year i will probably cry. also shoutout to sweetcorn the bestest most adorablest cat (wins out jimmy and sassy btw i dont care sweetcorn is the best fight me)

comments questions and arguments are all encouraged i stand firm in my stances (for now at least we'll see again 6 months later)

[russilton]

i reread the post a second time and i am absolutely barking at your george characterization. it's george in a different font but it still feels like him, and the way he reacts to everything just feels so real and human— although i am also in pain thanks 😭😭 /lh

but agh. him getting that merc contract feels CATHARTIC. i can't wait to see how it gets announced and publicized and how george is gonna rub it in redbull's faces. my god if this was real i swear the entirety of the internet would EXPLODEEE - @ruszhou

*through welling tears* thanks bro

It… God it means so much to me to hear he’s still in character. Writing George and Lewis for that AU is such a mixed experience. They’re sharper, meaner, they don’t hold back, and while it’s so fun it’s also weird as hell! It’s all fun and games saying they hate fuck till you have to write the hate… but like it’s a very weird kinda hate too, it’s skin deep, George doesn’t ever hate lewis he just wants his attention. Lewis doesn’t hate George either, he’s honestly deeply impressed by his driving skill, he just wishes george would be skilled somewhere out of his way sometimes. They are the personification of “the line between love and hate is paper thin”

Redbull George au spoilers below the cut

I was actually trying to plot all that out last night on my au timeline (I know, it’s painfully nerdy, but it helps develop the fic lmao) and George is going to sign just before Brazil for the sheer “fuck you” power it gives Lewis over Red bull that weekend, but his signing won’t be announced till WELL after the season ends. They don’t want to risk George getting possibly physically retaliated against by RB before the season is over. Lewis has to impress upon George how important it is he still fight Lewis on track, they all need to play the part. George humourlessly points out that Red bull have been deliberately using his car as a test car since Hungary, so he couldn’t fight Lewis if he tried. Lewis restrains all his angry sad feels about that.

I haven’t started on my points spreadsheet yet so I can’t say how George effects the WDC standings fully, but I still intend for them to go into AD on equal points, but George DOES assist Lewis ever so slightly by not fighting him as hard as Perez did, allowing Lewis to build a better lead gap. It’ll probably go that when his car craps out he drags it round to the pits so he doesn’t risk causing Lewis a safety car. Red bull can’t accuse him of anything, they’re the one that nerfed his car after all. Latifi does what George did in irl AD and limps his car to the pits too, there’s no safety car, Lewis wins and George finally feels like he can breathe.

He can’t celebrate with Merc even though he wants to, he just has to watch from afar. Red bull can’t know till he wants them to, but he does let Lewis catch his eye and grin at him.

George doesn’t really want to go back to the Red bull booked hotel that night, they all still hate him and they’re sulking. He and max cross paths once as final speeches are given, and max shoulder checks him hard. George is used to it but he’s so fucking tired, bruised, he wants to sleep this all off. As George is leaving the paddock Lewis greets him with a PR level driver handshake and back slap, but he presses a hotel keycard into George’s hand before leaving.

It’s a clear message, or at least George thinks it is. He and Lewis haven’t slept together since around silverstone bc of what Redbull were doing to George, but George figures this is a signal. He’s not sure he really wants to have sex, he just wants to sleep, but he doesn’t want to be alone surrounded my people who are mad at him. He heads to lewis’ hotel room without even going back to his own.

Lewis of course surprises him by rocking up with champagne and something horribly unhealthy they can’t eat during the on season, tells George he figures George needs something to celebrate getting 3rd and his new seat since his team won’t do it. It’s painfully tender and domestic in a way George doesn’t really understand, he keeps looking for signals of something from Lewis, but Lewis just talks to him. When George asks why he isn’t out celebrating with his team, Lewis shrugs and says it gets old after the 6th championship. George knows he’s lying but he can’t call him on it, so he just lets himself get tipsy on hotel champagne and finally let the weight of RB off his chest.

They share a bed, it’s some king size monster bc of course it is, Lewis doesn’t have to scrimp on size or cost in his bookings. They both sleep in their underwear on opposite sides of the bed, George knows he could go back to his hotel alone but he doesn’t want to. He’ll stay here till morning, grab his stuff and get on his flight back to London. It’s fine.

They wake up tangled together because of course they do, Lewis spooned up behind George, strong and steady, holding him tight. They end up having tender, slow morning sex, face to face and embarrassingly vulnerable. A polar opposite to their last angry rough fuck, here Lewis winds a hand with his and presses slow, soft kisses into his jaw while he takes George apart. Lewis praises him for all he’s gone through and George comes so hard he might pass out. He’ll be embarrassed by it all later but right now he just tucks his head into Lewis collar and rocks lazily with his thrusts.

They don’t announce Georges move immediately. They all head back to England, and wait. They don’t want People to think George manipulated redbulls end results, or jumped ship, they want to wait until he’s ready, but then around dec 16th or so redbull tell George they want to sign his AT contract, since he kept in line for the end of the season. They think they’re being so gracious and kind for it. George says sure sure Monday? I’m needed at some family events this weekend. Christian and Marko agree bc sure, they don’t think George has anything else going on. Mercedes announce they’ll be holding a press conference on their new driver line up on Sunday, one week out of AD. Christian even ends up on camera bc itv or something want to interview him for the end of the season and to react to the Merc press news. Nobody knew who Merc would be using to replace Val, it’s been completely silent behind the scenes.

So imagine of course, Christian’s sucked lemon face caught in 4k as Toto announces Lewis and George, who walk out in their contrast matching Merc shirts. Lewis looks like the cat who caught the canary. George looks like he’s terrified but trying to grin through it when Lewis gently bumps his shoulder in support. Toto sing’s George’s praises and announces how excited they are to welcome him to the team. When asked George will say he’s excited to work with a team that puts their drivers first. Christian has to grit his teeth as the itv hosts quiz him on it.

[sinkix]

Haikyuu!!│Boys going grocery shopping w/ you! HC’s│Ft. Bokuto, Nishinoya, Terushima, Kuroo & Kunimi

I had this late night idea and just HAD to follow through, the chaos would be O F F T H E C H A R T S. Thank you to @deathcab4daddy​ for helping me brainstorm some good characters for this post lmao I love you bby and can’t wait to do a collab. <3

E N J O Y ~ 

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

BOKUTO:

WHEN I TELL YOU THIS BOI PICKS UP EVERYTHING IN SIGHT LIKE A 6 YEAR OLD

 I FUCKING MEAN IT.

“(Y/N) we need this” 

“Bokuto we do not need a 7th jar of peanut butter.”

 “But (Y/N) it has a squirrel on the front-”

“BOKUTO I SWEAR TO GOD”

Tries to drift on the edge of the cart like something straight outta CSGO and the cart nearly obliterates under his weight.

V e r y l o u d u n e c c e s s a r i l y.

Everyone always stares at y’all when you’re going through the isles bc ur literally escorting a man-child sprawled in a shopping cart who’s going “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” at everything he sees like he’s a toddler at the zoo who’s never encountered a chimpanzee before.

Unless you have a bottomless bank account do NOT take him shopping of any kind he is LETHAL.

When you’re at the check-out he turns it into a basketball competition and tries to launch everything perfectly on to the conveyor belt.

Volleyball player? Nah this sis with the NBA now.

Do not ask him to go get something, he will return with at least 9 items you didn’t need and everything BUT the item you requested

He turned up with a whole ass pineapple, a jar of jam, a stick of butter and a bottle of olive oil.

Like,,,where is the correlation in those items???

Once made the mistake of asking him to grab some pads from the hygiene section and specified it HAD to be with wings

Boy showed up ten minutes later and looking very confuzzled.

You questioned why he has a pack of wingless pads in one hand and a can of red bull in the other.

He said it’s because they didn’t have any with wings so he figured the Redbull would suffice and do the job for you.

i-

NISHINOYA:

Can literally fit him in the little cart seat made for kids and he LOVES it lmaoooo IT’S SO CUTE MY HEART.

HE JUST SWINGS HIS LEGS EXCITABLY WHILE YOUR GETTING STUFF AAAAAAA

Ppl give you such weird looks though bc you have a guy who’s at least 14 years older than the intended demographic sitting there and raising his hands in elation over you copping a cookie dough pie and chucking it in.

Again, another who is VERY LOUD FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

Get’s out of the cart after a while bc his legs be growing numb and begins roaming around.

Someone came back with a feral Noya in hand stating “Is this your child” WNDKJWEFNWJEF.

M’AM HE’S LIKE 18 EXCUSE YOU.

Was salty about it for the rest of the day.

Just ruffle his hair and call him Senpai 

Problem solved.

Picks up tons of exotic fruit that look more like plastic or fuzzy poisonous plants and begs you to get them.

“Noya what the fuck is that.”

“...a Pitaya.”

“...”

“Can we get it-”

“no.”

“(Y/N)-”

“I SAID NO DAMMIT”

Last time you bought some strange fruit he took it to practise and got Tanaka to spike it LMAOOO

IT SPLATTERED E V E R Y W H E R E

AND OVER DAICHI’S SHIRT.

He begged you to no longer allow Noya to purchase weird fruits from then on since he is like a child with a nerf gun.

He once picked up a phat wrinkly purple fruit and turned to you asking if it was an overgrown raisin.

“Noya sweetie that’s a Date.”

HE FULLY TSK’ED AND THREW IT BACK SINCE IT REMINDED HIM OF DATE TECH I CAN’T.

My boy out here defending Asahi even in the Grocery Isles.

We stan a loyal king.

TERUSHIMA:

Another one who tries to stand on the ledge and the cart wheels almost collapse because it wasn’t designed to hold the weight of a young adult.

Oh young adult??? Sorry I mean’t MAN CHILD.

He treats a shopping experience as a time to practise his aim apparently because he ALWAYS THROWS SHIT AT YOU TO THE POINT YOU’RE THREATENED TO BE KICKED OUT.

Definitely picks up phallic looking objects and places them against his crotch, snorting and saying “Like what you see (Y/N)?”

Homeboy is stood there in front of a wife and child presenting his cucumber appendage for the world to see.

He once grabbed a pair of fat ass melons and pressed them against his chest, shaking them and belting the lyrics to ‘My Milkshake’ while begging you to SQUEEZE HIS MELONS.

“Look (Y/N) they’re bigger than yours!”

I just- 

I give up.

Constantly tries to sneak mutli-packs of energy drinks into the cart to the point you’re convinced he is going to keel over from heart failure and kidney stones by the age of 20.

Has his airpods in 90% of the time and treats the isles as his personal dance floor.

He busting them MOVES and performing the MJ moonwalk while in the dairy section.

ONCE HE SLID TOO FAST AND SLIPPED ON HIS REAR IN FRONT OF LIKE 12 PEOPLE LMAOO

He was DEAD silent the rest of the trip.

Probably the most serene shopping experience you’ve had to date.

The checkout clerks occasionally hit on Mr. Sore-Ass over here.

Until he opens his mouth and they realise he’s a total dolt and question how you have the patience for him.

You don’t know either honestly.

The whole bagging experience is spent with them shooting you sympathetic glances as if to say ‘sis you shoulda’ left him at home’.

Yes, yes you should have.

Never a dull moment with Teru as your shopping partner.

KUROO:

LITERALLY LIKE A MIDDLE-AGED MAN OR A TODDLER WHEN Y’ALL GO SHOPPING THERE IS NEVER AN EVEN MIDDLE-GROUND.

Frequently cracks lame-ass food puns or dad jokes that make you want to crawl into a hole and die.

You have competitions on who can come up with the most and the loser always faces a penalty.

Kuroo and creating penalties do NOT mix safely so you better hope you win.

“I love you a waffle lot.” 

Proceeds to hold up a wrapped waffle.

Ok that one was kinda cute you’ll let it slide.

“I ap-peach-iate you Kuroo.”

Cue HyenaLaugh.mp3

“Want a pizza me baby? Bitch peas, doughnut take me lightly.”

You changed your mind.

You didn’t talk to him the duration of that shopping experience, no penalty could be as horrifying as what just came out of his mouth.

“(Y/N)... sometimes I feel like you don’t carrot all.”

You slapped him with said carrot and obviously had to pay for it after.

You forced him to eat it raw.

He is the definition of Neutral disaster when you go shopping.

Shitty food puns aside, he is actually very responsible when making sure you both get what you need.

Not without tons of poking, prodding, and blowing into your ear while you’re trying to decide what ingredients to buy for dinner.

You contemplated serving him a plate of bubbling snot and moulded broccoli seasoned with rosemary.

Bone apple teeth, bitch.

Ofc you didn’t because he always pulls out the puppy eyes and cuddles card after since he knows he’s well and truly rattled your patience lmao.

Actually picks really healthy food options?? Being the captain of a team he has the responsibility of keeping his health in top condition and leading by example so at least he knows the right ingredients to make a bomb-ass and nutritious meal ig.

Y’all always bicker and tease each other at the checkout which is usually great amusement for the clerk serving you as they often smirk and perceive you as an old married couple.

Which tbh you kinda are, it feels like it at least.

Still such a big asshole though lmao you never leave the store without your sanity being scathed.

KUNIMI:

Honestly just wanted an excuse to make jokes at the expense of the Aoba Johsai teammates.

and what better candidate for cracking these than Kunimi.

He’s a very chill partner to have tag along with you on your endeavours.

Not without some grumbling and groaning on his part though, lazy bitch.

You always finish shopping trips with a busted lung at how much you have been laughing though with some of the SHADY ASS REMARKS HE MAKES ABOUT THE OTHER TEAM MATES.

You were outside the store when you both spotted an angry looking Doberman tied to a nearby post.

“Smh who let Kyotani outside again.”

You hadn’t even set foot in the store yet and he was already spitting flaming insults.

[Walking up to the automatic double doors]

“Damn Oikawa move out of my way.”

Oikawa just tryna live and he keeps getting roasted for his flat cheeks 

#StopOikawaAssShaming

Ten minutes of scouring the store later he picks up a spikey Kiwano and compares it to Iwaizumi’s hair.

Proceeds to beg you not to tell my boy Iwa because he KNOWS he will get decked to the gym floor.

Passers by often wonder why you’re wheezing and producing noises like a boiling kettle.

When I tell you no one is safe, I mean N O O N E.

“These Yule logs really out here looking like Matsukawa’s brows.”

The finisher was when Kunimi picked up a turnip and said 

“Huh, kinda looks like Kindaichi.”

I just-

He could roast a whole chicken in minutes from the burn of these comments I stg.

You can now never look at the Seijou team without various foods or inanimate objects plaguing your thoughts.

Thanks, Kunimi.

[go-ahead-and-whump]

Blondie

Bollard: Part I

It’s been....a while. Sorry I haven’t been posting anything to this story for so long. I still absolutely love Dan and Blondie, and thanks to @morelikepainsley, I’ve really renewed my love for these characters. Also, I feel the need to once again thank @deluxewhump for inspiring these characters in the first place with one of her short stories way back. And thank you so much to anyone still interested in reading! I’ll be adding the tag list at the end of this post, but if you’d like to be removed from the tag list for whatever reason, just dm me and I’ve got you covered! CW: mild blood, mild electrocution, dehumanization, general whump stuff.

It’s a good thing Shell gas stations carry ear plugs. If not, Blondie is certain he wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight. 

Dan snores particularly loudly when he’s extra tired, and they pushed for two extra hours on the road today. OTR operators are only supposed to be on the road for eleven hours, but Dan said he could handle it. Then, by the twelfth hour on the road he was persistently nursing a redbull and devouring sour patch kids by the fist full just to keep himself occupied until they reached the outer limits of Flagstaff. After parking, Blondie helped fuel the truck. He’s been learning how to help Dan during their pit stops by making sure everything was working as it should be. Supper was little more than two frozen entrees of and some zebra cakes for dessert. By the time Dan’s head hit the pillow, he was out like a light and snoring like a bear within minutes. 

Blondie doesn’t mind. He’s gotten used to the sound of the engine chugging almost 24/7, so Dan’s snoring isn’t much different. He falls asleep shortly after Dan, exhausted simply by proximity. By 9:30 both of them are passed out, dreaming of open roads and clear skies surrounded by snow capped mountains and rolling plains. 

Then mother nature calls. 

Blondie stirs awake, noticing that one of his earplugs is gone, probably tangled in his hair somewhere. He leans over the side of his bunk, reaching down to the nightstand where Dan’s phone sits charging, face up. The screen is blinding when he pokes the home button and he’s greeted by a picture Dan had taken of the two of them standing in front of the Jolly Green Giant statue in Minnesota from one of the trips they’d made going up to Ontario, Canada. The memory of when the photo was taken passes briefly though Blondie’s mind and the corner of his mouth quirks up. 

It’s 3:56 a.m: mountain time. Keeping track of the time becomes an impossible chore when they’re on the road, going from timezone to timezone, losing and gaining hours, sometimes two in a day. 

“Dan.” Blondie leans further over the edge of his bunk and feels his hair fall down over his shoulders like Rapunzel. He pokes Dan’s shoulder hesitantly. “Dan?”

The snoring stops, but Dan doesn’t wake. Blondie tries one more time. 

“Dan...wake up.” He shakes Dan’s shoulder with a little bit more force. 

“Hmm?” 

“I have to use the bathroom.” Blondie whispers, feeling childish. He shouldn’t be waking Dan, especially after such a long day, but he can’t leave the truck without telling his master.

“Oh.” Dan murmurs, still only half awake. He turns from his stomach onto his side and checks the time on his phone as well. Same as Blondie, he winces when the brightness of the screen burns his retinas and he lets out a displeased grunt, straining to read the time. “Okay.” He mumbles, twisting under the covers like he’s trying to muster the will to sit up.

“You don’t have to get out of bed.” Says Blondie, staring down like a bat. “I...I can go alone. I just wanted to let you know.” 

Dan sucks in a breath and tries to speak as he yawns. “I should….go with you.” 

But Blondie knows he’s tired, and the thought of dragging Dan out of bed at four in the morning just to follow him to the bathroom seems ridiculous. He’s perfectly capable of going on his own. He’s being a pain.

“Please, Dan?” Blondie chews his lip. “You drove a lot today. I can go alone, I promise. I’ll be really quick.” 

A handful of seconds pass in silence aside from the sound of the engine and Dan’s breathing, heavy from having just woken up. When he doesn’t respond, Blondie wonders if it’s because he’s fallen back asleep. Then Dan sighs once more and lifts an arm to scratch between his shoulder blades. He’s shirtless. Dan only ever wears sweatpants to bed, unless they’re further up north. Getting up would mean he would have to put on a sweatshirt and some socks, then he’d have to slip into his work boots just to walk outside for a trip that he doesn’t even need to make. 

“Alright.” 

Blondie beams in silent victory and slides down from his bunk. 

“Just make sure you wake me up when you come back so I know you’re safe.” 

“I will.” Blondie shuffles into his tennis shoes and steps outside. The air is cool. Autumn in Arizona gets chilly, especially at night, but Blondie bops along through the maze of semi trailers to the humming, greenish-yellow light of the gas station convenience store. ...

Morning comes with a wave of unease, and Dan recalls the vague seed of anxiety in his gut he used to get way back in high school on days when his brain tricked him into thinking he’d overslept an important exam. He grunts. His limbs ache in protest as he gets up. The mixture of exhaustion and adrenaline from waking up anxious swirls in his head and makes him dizzy. He needs coffee. Shell gas stations always have the worst coffee. It’s burnt and tastes like jet fuel, but caffeine is caffeine, and Dan isn’t about to drink a redbull at a quarter to seven in the morning. He remembers seeing a cappuccino machine inside next to the coffee. Blondie likes iced lattes, so he’ll have to pick up a one for--

Fuck. 

That seedling of anxiety is there again, suddenly digging it’s tendrils into the pit of Dan’s stomach and root. Dan shoots out of bed and feels his heart stop when he sees the empty bunk above him. 

“Fuck.” His breath starts to pick up and his blood thickens like ice in his veins. “Blondie.”

Before he even tries to gain control of the racing thoughts that are whipping through his mind, Dan practically jumps through the passenger’s side door of the tractor, not bothering to grab a shirt or even a pair of shoes as he leaves. 

“Blondie?!” He shouts, feeling the chill of the morning raise goosebumps on his arms. Dan cups his hands around his mouth and calls again. “Blo--ndie!” He calls like a master to their dog.  

How long has he been out, two hours? Three? Maybe he got stuck in the bathroom. Maybe he couldn’t find his way back to the truck and asked to stay in the store. Dan jogs around the front of the semi, vaguely aware of how the cold gravel beneath his feet makes his skin ache. Is he shaking from the cold, or something else? 

“Blo----ndie!”

There are other drivers headed to and from the convenience store with their morning cups of joe in hand. Other drivers sit outside their tractors smoking a cigarette. Some are checking under the hoods of their trucks to make sure they’re all set to head off. All of them are staring at Dan as he jogs around in nothing more than an old pair of grey sweats with a look of hopeless panic in his eyes. 

Dan spends somewhere upwards of ten minutes weaving in and out of the parking lot, checking for any sign of his missing pet. Under the trailers, behind the tires, maybe even sitting next to the driver’s door. Each time he rounds a corner, he imagines, with a pathetic shred of optimism, that he might catch a glimpse of that blond head of hair wandering around aimlessly in search of his master. 

Cold dread sets in. The parking lot is much emptier now than it was last night. At least half of the trucks must be gone, and although Dan knows better than to lump his fellow drivers into one stereotype, he’s met plenty of creeps on the road. Plenty of scummy old men who might be out for a smoke in the middle of the night that catch a glimpse at a pretty boy and think that he’s a fine prize to bring with them. A few nice words, that’s all it would take. Well, aren’t you a good boy? I’m sure you are. Such a pretty young thing. 

“For fuck’s sake.” Dan seethes in anger at himself. Shut the fuck up. You know Blondie is smarter than that. He’s not a fucking labrador. He can take care of himself. 

But another voice in the back of Dan’s brain says, No he can’t. 

He wonders if that’s true. Sure, the kid has gotten better at speaking up for the things he wants, but realistically, Dan knows that it would be all too easy for some man to have snatched him up in the middle of the night and dragged him into their truck. By now, they could be across the border in any which direction, never to be seen again.

Nausea sets in so quickly that Dan has to steady himself against the side of a flatbed and cup his hand over his mouth, breathing deeply to keep from throwing up. He’s never been one to pass out in situations like this, normally he doesn’t crumble under pressure, but suddenly the floor is starting to look a little too comfortable and he can feel himself swaying. 

Do I call the cops? What do the cops do about it? How would they know? I have a picture of him but--

As if conjured up by his thoughts, Dan turns the corner around an old, blue Kenworth and finds a police cruiser parked in front of the convenience store. Two, in fact. And a state trooper....and an ambulance. 

Their lights are all flashing.

In front of one of the cruisers is an officer, sitting back against the hood of her vehicle. Her head is tilted to the side, and she seems to be saying something into the walkie talkie on her shoulder. 

Dan takes a step forward and finds that his legs have turned into jello. He’s shaking. All of the responders are staring at one spot on the ground, standing around with their hands on their hips or with their arms crossed. Waiting. No one seems to be in any hurry to do anything. Whatever they’re staring at, they aren’t rushing to help, and suddenly Dan isn’t so sure he wants to see what it is they’re all looking at, but his feet keep leading him closer to the scene. 

A pair of legs comes into view, lying on the ground. Dan recognizes the size 10 black sneakers he’d bought two months ago. 

The world tilts off of its axis. Dan breaks into a sprint. 

“Blondie!” He shouts the only word that can come to mind and his voice comes out more like a plea. “Blondie!”

Before Dan can break through the small gathering of spectators and responders, three officers are on him pushing against him in restraint. “Sir!” They shout. “Sir, please step back. We need you to stay back!” They form a wall and grab him by the shoulders, shoving and pushing him back as he tugs against them. As big as Dan is, he’s but only one man. Still he puts up a fight and it takes all three officers using a good amount of force to keep him from bursting through the crowd. 

“Let go! Let me go!” Dan barks, fighting back with every ounce of the strength he has left. “I need to see him! Let me fucking see him!”

“Sir! Please just step back!” 

A few of the onlookers standing nearby shuffle away at the commotion and suddenly Dan gets a clear view of the scene. There, sitting on the chipped pavement of the sidewalk with his back pressed up against one of the bollards, is Blondie. Not his body, but him. He’s alive, he’s breathing, and Dan wonders for a moment why the officers have cuffed him to the bollard but after another moment’s inspection he realizes that he isn’t bound by handcuffs. Just like his ankles, his wrists are bound with a bright orange zip tie, and his arms are pulled back around the other side of the yellow pole. When he looks up, Dan can feel his breath escape him. There’s blood caked around his mouth, a congealed mess that looks like it dripped from his nose. Two dark, crescent shaped bruises outline the heavy bags under his eyes which are puffy and red. His cheeks are pale white and streaked with the salt of his tears. 

That cold, gnawing grief flutters away, now replaced with the desperate urge to curl around Blondie and hide him from the world. Dan tugs again at the officers restraining him. “Blondie!” He shouts, almost euphoric with relief.

“Dan?” Blondie echoes a weak response.

“Sir if you don’t step back we are going to taze you.” the shortest officer says. It’s clear that all three of them are losing their patience, but Dan remains undeterred. “He’s mine!” Dan bellows, sounding more and more like a snarling animal with each passing second. Loud. Mean. Dangerous. “He belongs to me! He’s mine! Let me go! Let me fucking go!” Dan manages to tug one arm free, giving him a slight purchase–a single step closer to Blondie. Then, faster than anyone can react, a bang rings out. The crowd flinches, and Dan feels two prongs speared into the bare skin of his back. The pain comes in less than in instant, before Dan even realizes what has happened. It’s stinging, tugging, aching, sharp and burning. A noise rips through his throat like a wounded animal and every muscle in his body tenses for what feels like minutes before he falls limp to the ground right in front of Blondie. His body lands with a thud, his bare chest scraping against the chip seal pavement. Sharp little pebbles bite and nip into his skin, and he can feel the road rash on his knees and arms. The side of his head collides with the ground and a sharp crack rings through his ears, followed by an immediate and piercing note.

“DAN!” Blondie screams, sobbing and tugging against his restraints. Dan writhes on the ground, gritting his teeth as the stinging shocks of pain are amplified with the incessant clicking noises, the sound of the electricity being fired into his body from the taser and Blondie wailing his name. Then there’s a weight on top of him, someone cuffing his arms behind his back. Dan coughs and gasps under the pressure and yelps at the sensation of the barbed rods being ripped from his skin.

“Wait!” 

He’s definitely bleeding now. He can feel blood dripping down his temple.  “Wait! Please!” He begs, “Please! I’m his owner!” Despite the pulsing pressure that makes his head feel like it’s going to explode, he tries desperately to yell over the sound of Blondie’s crying. “His name is Blondie! He has a chip under his left arm! If you scan it my name will pop up: Daniel Robert Schmidt! I bought him at a shelter on West Palm Avenue in Miami! I have his papers and documents in my truck! Please! Please! I don’t know how else to tell you,” A wheeze breaks up his plea and he dissolves into a fit of wet coughs. “I don’t know how else to tell you that he’s mine!” Blondie is weeping openly and Dan can’t bring himself to look away. “Da––an!” He sobs. “Don’t let them take you!” Fresh blood starts dripping from his nose, loosened by snot and tears. “Don't let them take you!” The audience around them must be enjoying their show, Dan thinks and seethes as they watch on. He huffs and puffs under the weight of the officer’s body pinning him down, and then there is a shadow looming over him. Someone curses, spewing insults at the officer who’s pinning him to the ground. A pair of black work shoes, like the ones doctors wear in hospitals, stands in front of his face. “For pete’s sake, get off of him!” And the weight of the officer is yanked away and replaced by the feeling of two cold hands on his back, holding him firmly but not painfully to the ground. “Uncuff him.” Says the woman standing at his head. Only one hand is cuffed, but Dan keeps both hands behind his back. He hears the sound of a small key jingling behind him and soon the cold weight on his wrist is removed. Dan scrambles up to his knees and crawls to Blondie, blocking the invasive gaze of those onlookers who are still standing around, waiting for the story to be resolved. He doesn’t have the heart to feel angry at the moment. All he can think of is the trembling body is his arms, shivering from the cold and fear, whimpering as Dan hushes him and smoothes the down his neck.

It takes a moment for it to register in Dan’s head that Blondie is whimpering in pain too. His arms are still bound behind the pole. He turns around to ask if someone can remove the zip ties, but the woman is already one step ahead of him. She crouches behind the bollard and whips out a pocket knife. With one upward tug, the restraints are removed. Blondie sags forward, finally breathing with the full capacity of his lungs again. His shoulders are numb for a few seconds until the lactic acid burns around his shoulder blades and the soreness sets in. All he can do is lean against Dan. His fingers are freezing, his skin feels raw from the cold, and his toes are going numb, even from under the cover of his shoes. The rubber toes on his sneakers aren’t good for insulation. “Dan.” Blondie groans and tucks his face into Dan’s neck. Every inch of him feels sore or cold or numb from the two sensations. The EMT breaks the zip ties around Blondie’s ankles. “Mr. Schmidt, if you’ll follow me. We have a place for the two of you in the ambulance. I’d like to check the both of you for any injuries that need immediate medical attention.” She is short–only up to around Blondie’s shoulder–and Dan can’t tell if she’s closer to his age or Blondie’s. “Hold on to me, sweetheart.” Dan whispers and presses a kiss to Blondie’s temple. “Hold on. We’re gonna be okay.” __________________ Sorry for the abrupt cut off. Part 2 will be up very soon. Tag List:  @neuro-whump @inky-whump @faewhump @thingsthatgo-whump-inthenight @looptheloup @whimperwoods @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @oracle-of-maybe @galaxywhump @newandfiguringitout @whumpqhs again, if I missed anyone or if anyone would like to be added or removed from the tag list, just send me a message and I can take you off!

[pinkbutterfly84]

Scorpion Season 1

I have watched Scorpion several times and thought I would post about each episode, favourite moments, quotes, thoughts questions I have!

This will be heavily quintis based as I love their relationship ❤

Not done this before so here goes.........

1.01 - one of the best pilot episodes I've seen was hooked from the start. Loved seeing the relationships from the beginning Happy and Toby had chemistry from the start

Sneaky cameo from the real Walter o'Brian, caring Paige, OCD Sylvester, Cocky Toby, Insensitive Walter and Snarky Happy

Question: is that how Eddie runs or does he run like that as Toby always makes me laugh?

Favourite scene - server scene with Happy and Toby it showed Toby's unique profiling skills

Favourite quote Happy " I hate you" Toby "no you dont"

1.02 - start to see the characters back stories Toby with his gambling, Walter and Megan, Happy being abandoned and remembering it and Cabe and the loss of his daughter

Happy seemed jealous of Toby keeping current with his ex fiancee

Toby bites his nails when he is nervous or worried you see it for the first time in this episode

Favourite scene - happy and toby in the truck talking about love

You see Happy sharing personal details with Toby starting to show the depth of their friendship

Favorite quote - Toby "Earl knows his way around a hoagie"

I love that Sly gives his pay cheque away money isn't everything

Loved meeting Megan bought out a softer side of Walter

Wished Toby was at the BBQ instead of gambling think he realised it was ok to move on from Amy

1.03 - meeting Merrick for the first time who doesn't like Scorpion

Happy assaulting a Marine is hilarious

Happy feeling up Toby to take money is a good insight into their future

Happy and Toby reading together is so cute

Favourite quote - "be determined to have a great day and you will"

"Mensa please there are pornstars in mensa"

Favourite scene - end scene Scorpion is a family like a Cyclone

1.04 - Walters interpersonal skills in this episode are seriously lacking from how he speaks to Toby to his flippant dismissal of the card dealer

The way Walter speaks to Toby is out of line gambling is a risk one Walter wanted Toby to take how is it his fault he lost the money. Walter said some hurtful things to Toby it must of hurt to hear them from his supposed best friend

First sign of Toby's attraction to Happy when he makes a comment about having worse views when following her in the vents

Favourite scene - Happy and Toby zip lining to the casino showed happy's skills she made it look so easy and the start of Tony saying 'oh my........'

Favourite quote - "I'm like a blind man at a peep show what's the point"

1.05 - I love this episode get to be introduced to Mark Collins and see Happy truly angry and Toby starting to understand how to help her

Favourite quote- "if this nuclear powerplant doesn't melt down the team might"

Favourite scene- the end scene with the look between Toby and Happy

To me this episode is the starting point of Quintis from the note passed between them to Toby defending Happy to Collins to 'that look' between them at the end. I think that look is when Happy starts thinking of Toby as other than a friend

Question - do you think Happy kept the note? I like to think she has a keepsake section of a toolbox and things like the note goes in there

1.06 - I like how this episode switches between the physic evaluations and the story. It shows how the team all rely on Walter and how much respect they have for him

I feel like Walter uses his lack of emotions as an excuse for his actions

Quick cameo from Hetty from ncis - the dress on Paige looked amazing

This episode also sees the start of Tony's obsession with Happy dressing up

First introduced to super fun guy Sly's love for the action hero is a great character arc

Favourite quote-"you cant make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" or "just starting to see the scope of what's to be done"

Favourite scene-Toby getting crushed by wine bottles gets me everytime

1.07 - The team meets Drew, Ralph's dad the first of several interlopers into the team

Toby's keen perception skills pick up Happys feelings on not knowing her dad. Happy shreds Toby's finding but obviously regrets it and puts it back together

Seeing how much the guys care about Ralph and the impact of Drew coming back is really sweet

Favourite scene- Toby listening to 'Brandy' and singing in the car. Downloaded this song myself love that this show opened my eyes to new music

Favourite quote- "I'm gonna slap it like ot owes me money" or "I'm so turned on" or "serious as a pink freen and dont call me Shirly, BAM that's how you do it Cabe"

1.08 - why does Toby seem so excited to go into a crime scene?

Toby working up the courage to ask out Happy is a very 'normal' fear it puts him out of his comfort zone

Toby in a suit looking fit!

Question - how do you think Happys date went? I like to think she calls Toby after as it went so bad that they meet and go for pie or something

Favourite scene- Paige singing Kat has a really beautiful voice

Favourite quote- Paige"so him jumping the fence" Toby "he's meditating"

1.09 - this episode gives you a back story to Cabes character and his strong family values

Walter has a surprising EQ moment giving cabe the letters Rebecca wrote

Favourite scene- there wasn't one scene in this episode that stood out for me but Robert Patrick's acting definitely was the best of the episode

Favourite quote- "dear lord thank you for this gift"

Walter seems alot more in tune with his emotions and understanding other his relationship with cabe grew during this episode

1.10- probably my favourite episode of season 2

Loved seeing Megan and Sly interact and there friendship develop

Happy must be starting to feel safe around Toby to fall asleep on his shoulder and let her guard down

Walter doesn't know how to process peoples emotions of grief

The end Happy and Toby scene shows Happy needs time and in her way asks Toby not to give up

Favourite quote- ' I'm Happy' ' and I'm dying but you don't see me telling everyone'

Favourite scene- Happy and Toby on the rocks where Toby is sorting Happy's ankle. Toby is being truthful about his feeling and Happy is not sure how to react so they default to there defense mechanisms of wise cracks and putting up a shield

1.11 - I hate to love this episode any episode where Sly is hurt shouldn't be such a good episode but seeing how each member of the team deal with his injuries gives a real insight to their characters

I would of really of liked to see Toby tending to Sly at the scene he always deals with these emergency situations well

Love Megan...... just saying

I like how Toby walks to Happys truck like being by her possessions soothes him

In so many episodes Toby supports Happy and provides comfort in his own way but on this episode Happy is there for Toby when he is struggling to process the events

More scenes with Toby in his underwear please 🔥

Favourite quote- 'I'm taking a minute' ' we dont have a minute' 'I'm taking one any way'

Favourite scene- the end scene where the team are reading comics around Sly bed

1.12 - there are not many episodes where I actually like Walter but this is one of them what he does to save the boy is amazing and shows he doed have feelings

One of the few if only episide I dont like Sly when a kids life is at risk his insecurities should take 2nd place

Love Christmas episodes even with Black sabbath

Does anyone notice Toby putting his hand on Happy's shoulder in the cave to comfort her

Happy always listens to Toby may not seem it at the time but you later find out she has like going to see her father

I wonder if Toby and Happy spend Christmas day together I would like to think they meet and grab a meal at Kavalskis or have a take away

Toby watching Happy leave the hotel room he knows exactly where she is going I often eat h the background scenes more then the main ones

Favourite quote- ' I watch you work sometimes' 'thank you for making this creepy'

Favourite scene- Ralphs present and where Paige gives out her Christmas ornament gifts so many funny quips

1.13 - 1 step forward 2 steps back with Walter this episode shows his naivety with Ralph

Happys face when Toby said he was going to use the van as a make out hut with a lucky lady is it a jealous face or a will that lucky lady be me face??

I love seeing behaviourist Toby just as much as the daft funny one

El Gaupo loves this Sly is hilarious

Favourite quote- 'your no good with your hands, your a spiller'

'I'm rocking so much adrenaline right now my blood is basically redbull'

Favourite scene- this is actually a deleted scene from the dvd out takes happy teaching tobyvto break into a safe and Toby showing her digital surgery shows them wanting to understand each other more

1.14 - love how the genius cannot fathom the text message could be a genuine love messsge

Another jealous moment from Happy the look on her face when Toby ask if the lady owns a catsuit very amusing

Walter looks so uncomfortable talking to Fatima even with Paige in his ear he is clueless

Toby and Happy both looking like they have made an effort in their looks in this episode perhaps for each other??

Question anyone notice how Happy and Toby always stand next to each other or offer yo work together??

Favourite quote- 'did they rush Mozart when he wrote a sonet'

Favourite scene- happy scaling the building 'because she's Happy freaking Quinn'

1.15 - Walter has very selfish view on Ralph potentially moving to Portland he thinks he is the only one who can help Ralph

Toby's skills shine in this episode his facial expressions are hilarious but he manages to stay serious to deal with the situation

Favourite scene- another episode I dont really have a favourite scene it's an ok episode not much Quintis storyline

Favourite quote- 'it's cold hard metal yet so delicate and beatiful' - anyone else thinks Toby is talking about Happy not what she has made

'Andrew' 'its drew actually' 'and Drew is short for what exactly Michael'

1.16- this is a turning point episode for quintis Happy realises Toby is truly interested in exploring something more with her and Toby realises Happy values their friendship and just needs time....... like half a day till the end of the episode lol

Love Paige's outfit would love to be able to pull that off

Favourite quote- 'love can be misspelled and messy it just needs to be given a chance'

Favourite scene- the almost kiss obviously- Happy finally letting her guard down reaching out to hold Toby's hand and almost kissing

I like to think Happy and Toby went out for drinks after - not a date but maybe to talk or Toby to talk and Happy to sit stoically

1.17 - the is a lovely Melvester episode it really shows the love develping between them and the last scene dancing us lovely

I find Walter particularly arrogant in this episode wanting to prove something

Toby's eyes following Happy as she walks up the plane small looks and actions between them hint at a developing relationship

Anyone notice how close Happy stands to Toby when he is sat on the counter they are definitely touching she may even be leaning on him

Toby is so worried about Happy he literally stands by the door waiting for her to come back

Favourite quote- 'a very embarrassed person I just got kidnapped by 4th grader'

'I'm dangling a human being by a bed sheet that is my status'

Favourite scene- where the team are waiting to see if the kid does runner everyone doubting Toby and his skills only to be proven he was right and profiled the kid accurately

I'm actually changing my mind the scene between Walter and Sly is really moving and shows how much they love each other

I always like to think what would happen with the characters after and between episodes at this point I think Happy and Toby would be spending alot of time together after the trips grabbing a beer and pizza getting to know each other away from scorpion

1.18 - an ok episode introduces ferret bueller the team pet

Happy's face when Toby stops the doctor from injecting Walter obviously likes tough Toby making a stand

Favourite quote- 'are we judging people on their past resumes as you were a departmental Santa to help pay for college'

Favourite scene- the kiss...... comes as a shock to us and Toby, he us clearly surprised doesn't know what to do with his hands. If you listen carefully you can hear toby hum in the kiss clearly enjoying it. Happy also doesn't want it spoiling by Toby's analysis hence telling him to shut up

1.19 - Toby leaves his hat behind doesn't want yo loose the present Happy bought him

Happy annoyed at Toby for trying to protect her she has been independent for so long having someone care enough to risk his life unsettles her and she doesn't know how to deal with it

First time Toby really admits how he feels even though he gets an extinguisher in his face Hapy knows what he is trying to say

Song at the end by the old 97's another great song not heard until watching this series

Favourite quote- I'm the gambling expert we be dating

Favourite scene- the last scene with Happy and Toby on the roof they dont even look where the paper plane goes they are going on a date!!

1.20 - oh dear poor Happy poor Toby what an idiot!

Toby being nervous is so cute but poor guy sleeping through his date bad move

I think that Happy wasn't quite in the right place to start dating Toby what he did was stupid but not unforgivable I think she wanted an excuse and she was too scared to get involved and risk getting hurt or risk their friendship and this gave her the perfect excuse to stop it before it went any further

Even when she is mad at him she still wants the closeness by standing next to him and he is the one assisting her on the bus

The fact Happy still calls him Doc 'her name for him' shows she still cares her anger is a defense mechanism because she finally opened herself up and she got hurt something she didnt think Toby would ever do even though it wast intentional

Favourite scene - Toby talking to happy in the bus opening up about his past and his insecurities

Favourite quote- probability theroy dictates you cannot predict the future with absolute certainty but this is an exception there is zero chance she will accept your appology

1.21 - not overly keen on this episode Walter was extreme in his reaction to Cabes secret especially considering his big secret!

Happy is still annoyed at Toby yet she walks over and keeps standing close to him when in the garage

Anyone notice how their actions start to mimic each other - both standing hands in Jean pockets it's like they are in sync with each other

Favourite scene- watching this episode makes me realise there is no favourite scene but it is a great backstory to the next episode

Favourite quote- 'lying billionaire says what'

1.22 - poor Walter doesn't deal with abandonment or trust issues very well

Toby is amazing saving Walter's life without actually touching him

Happy offering for Toby to come babysit with her, she's thawing towards Toby friendship is getting back on track

Favourite quote- 'that dont have the brain power of me with a hangover and him when hes sleeping'

Favourite scene- I love this whole episode keeps you gripped to the edge of your seat

Recap on Season 1

Favourite Episode - there are several which make my top episodes the episode in Bosnia, Love Boat but I think 1.19 is my favourite high action surrounded by fire with so.e lovely Quintis moments

Favorite Scene - Quintis first kiss a moment which had been building fir several episodes

A great first season building all the characters back stories this is my best season for Paige she is still genuine I feel as seasons go on she looses who she was.

I love the Megan and Sky story 2 damaged persons one physically one emotionally finding love

Walter I cant gel with the character I know he is the leas but I find him condensing and arrogant (I'm sorry not a popular opinion I'm sure)

Quintis- this season is all about building their backstory to their relationship they are both emotionally damaged by their pasts. They start as work colleagues and friends, grow to best friends who learn to share and rely on each other and stronger feelings develop.

Toby realises his feelings first and is more open and honest about them, Happy is slower on the uptake and reluctant to be a thing more then friends as she doesn't want to risk what they have. Eventually she gives in to her feelings that kiss and arrange a date. Things dont go well and she quickly retreats back to Angry Happy. After such a close ckmall with Walter I think she realises life is too short and seemingly forgives Toby asking him to babysit with her..... what happens then is left to our imaginations - I like to think they go back to the garage Toby needs someone with him that night to prevent him gambling and Happy knows this. He struggles saving his best friends life not being able to physically help. I think they talk like old friends Toby doesn't push it as he knows the time isnt quite right and they have a night if beer, pizza and chat

Let's see what Season 2 brings .............

[illlogicals]

☆ﾟ*・ﾟWOAH is that DANNY BLAISE ? i’ve heard they’re a SHIFTER ( PYTHON ) originally from CALIFORNIA. they came here because HE NEEDED A SAFE PLACE AWAY FROM HIS FAMILY and they’ve been here for 4 years. as a 25 / 25 year-old, i’m sure they’re skilled. someone told me they’re SARCASTIC & SELF-SERVING  but i think they’re CHARMING & SELECTIVELY PROTECTIVE.  i can’t help but think of (gotta fix these w/ the new fc change) when i look at them.  —

hey!! my name is vic! I like long walks on the beach, those tiny pink umbrellas in my chocolate milk, and cold, hard CA$H. that and posting memes and destroying the lives of my character children are really what gets me going through this holiday szn. ANYWAYS. lets get on to why you’re really here.

meet danny.

tw: parental death, car crash, abuse, minor blood mention

➝ born daniel blaise bennett, but shortened his name down to danny blaise after he moved from home. ‘home’ was somewhere drifting along the coast of del mar, california in a small beach house owned by close relatives. he used to live there with his aunt and uncle and their three boys after danny’s parents died in a car crash when he was only four. he never really knew his parents and didn’t put much thought into why the universe had to take them away from him without getting to say goodbye. his aunt explained that things just happen and there wasn’t any use into devouring details of his bitter past. his uncle didn’t think it very good of him to cry about it, so they would often go at it back and forth until danny really had something to cry about. we do not stan danny’s uncle in this house !!

➝ he’s very aware of what his family is and he wishes from time to time that his dad was around to show him more about it, but settles for history lessons from one of his many cousins. as he got older, he began to realize that he really does loves his family’s history as well as people like him and what their bloodline means. which often makes him come off as proud. filled to the brim with a pride that not even the deadliest creature can wipe clean. and it often gets him into trouble. my boy has a bad knack for not keeping his mouth shut.

➝ his cousins, mainly the ones that lived with him, never really liked having him around. they just sort of dealt with him because they really didn’t have a choice. and it wasn’t like their parents could just kick danny out as a kid. so instead they treated him like a broke-down cinderella. a cinder-fella, if you want to get fancy. only danny doesn’t cook or clean. he’s essentially a fall guy for them. his cousins would go out, get into trouble at whatever boardwalk, bar, or party, and then blame it on danny. which eventually kept leading to danny constantly getting into fights with random people in town and getting a very hefty record with the local police. “he’s just a shitty kid with no parents. what do you expect?” well, danny will actually pay you in colorful monopoly money over how many times he’s heard that phrase after getting dropped off in a cop car.

➝ things were getting so bad that danny was starting to realize that his cousins weren’t doing it accidentally to toughen him up like they used to say back in the day. they were doing it on purpose. they wanted danny to get jumped, or even worse...to expose himself in front of humans and get him locked up in some freaky horror institution where they use him for science experiments and then kill him when they’re done. that’s probably what scared danny the most. so as he got older he simply tried to lay low by working on broken cars and attempting to surf whenever he wasn’t. before he came to the school however his cousins got him baaaad one last time. but instead of meeting danny up with some loser they messed with at a party, they were the ones who jumped him and nearly beat him to a bloody pulp before someone found him laying weak on the ground. they offered to drive danny back home, but he refused and decided to find shelter elsewhere.

➝ he doesn’t talk about his family. he doesn’t talk about his cousins. danny really doesn’t talk about anything regarding himself. he’s here to learn. he’s here to make a better life. he covers emotions with sarcasm and can usually be found strolling around the grounds by himself. what he plans on doing once this is all over? good luck finding out, sis.

sooooo, yeah. this is really all that I have. I’m still working on nix and savannah but hopefully they’ll be up tomorrow.  maybe tonight if I chug a redbull. but yes. this is danny. he’s a wee baby who deserves better.

[kelmcdonald]

A Year in Review 2017

New Post has been published on http://sorcery101.net/news/a-year-in-review-2017/

A Year in Review 2017

Hi everyone,

So it’s the end of the year. I have been looking back over the year to make my goals for next year. Last year I posted my goals on Patreon for the highest backer level. It’s a level that no one ever backed at. I don’t know if the price was too high or just general lack of interest. But I liked writing those posts so as long as I have time, I think I’ll start posted some edited versions of them free on my site each month. Before I started doing that I thought I’d post a public behind the scenes wrap up.

2017 was rough and exhausting. That’s true for a lot of people.

I tried to stick to my professional and personal goals anyway. I also tried a few experiments to see how things would work out.

Last year, I had a few business/income related goals. I wanted to focus on building my Patreon, my newsletter, and my store. I wanted to get rid of ads and do less cons. Ads are ugly and hard to track down bad ones. Cons I want to do less of because they are exhausting to me. I don’t think I’ve ever got creative burn out but I definitely get hussle/promo burn out. It’s been taking me longer and longer to recover from cons. So anywhere that I can get money which isn’t from cons if great.

A lot of my site redesign was to push those things.

My newletter is I think the most successful of those goals. I got a good few hundred folks signing up from my website and a bunch of folks signing up after my kickstarter. Next year I’m gonna try to focus on making it better. I few people asked for highlights from the blog here as well as promo. But I’m still taking suggestions if anyone wants to leave them in the comic. Right now it’s just promo but if I don’t have promo that month I end up not knowing what to write.

The shop getting pushed more, I think it did better than last year but I haven’t crunched the numbers yet.

Patreon didn’t go very well this year. I wanted to get more patrons there to mostly get rid of ads. I ended up making less money on patreon than before. I used to charge weekly and thought switching to monthly would help get more people on board, but I never ended up attracting enough people to make up for the difference. I tired a few different things like business posts like this one, sketch requests, and streams. At first I was posting my early comics in a big PDF but then was told more frequent posts get peoples attention more. I also tried to post more art on there. None of those really enticed people to jump on. I don’t know if people just don’t like my stuff. If I’m just not cut out for promoting a long term thing rather just doing a focused push for one big project. Either way I’m feeling pretty discouraged and after last weeks debacle with the fee change is leaving me kinda sour on Patreon. In 2018 I’m gonna try to focus on other stuff that might pay off more.

I was looking for more work from publishers and companies in 2017 too. Or more working smarter not harder with companies. That didn’t pay off in 2017 but it get me some cool stuff lined up for 2018.

But for now it looks like I’m gonna still be hitting up 10 or more cons a year.

On the somewhat creative goal and somewhat personal, I spent a lot of of this year making sure I kept up with my comic reading. It can be easy to not keep up with reading new comics and know what is out there when you are busy trying to make comics. I buy most of my comics at conventions but I got an ipad pro to be a portable digital drawing tool so I’ve been reading a lot of manga on that. But here’s some high stuff I really enjoyed and will probably write about on my blog over the coarse of next year. I read them this year but they didn’t all come out this year. The webcomics I’m just gonna link cause they are free to read but I usually just read the print collections when it comes to webcomics. So when I say I read them this year I mean the print collection.

Wilde Life by Pascalle Lepas 

Agents of the Realm by Mildred Louis

The Meek by Der-shing Helmer

Feywinds by Nicole Chartrand

Check Please by Ngozi Ukazu

O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti

A Silent Voice by Yoshitoki Ōima which is about a guy trying to get forgiveness from the deaf girl he bullied in elementary school. It’s very intense and grips with complicated questions about who gets forgiven and who decides who gets that forgiveness.

Monstress by Marijorie liu and  Sana Takeda. It’s a fantasy epic that is set in a matriarchal setting where magical humanoid creatures and sorceresses are at war. The main character is trying to learn more about an elder god type thing that has taken over her arm. It’s gorgeous and complicated and female focused. This might be my favorite comic right now.

Fun Family by Ben Frisch. I picked this up because I went to college which Ben. Fun Family is a fictional behind the scenes of Family Circus. It kinda odd but I liked it because it explores how a simple wholesome comic like Family Circus can be comforting when your home life is falling apart.

Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama. I don’t got to tell you all what Dragon Ball is about. But I read it for the first time and really liked it. I had only seen the anime before this. It was interesting to see the source material. I thought it was a lot of fun.

Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwaki. Most anime fans know about this one too but again I read it this year. For you none anime fans alien parasites take over human hosts and replace their heads. The main character gets his hand taken over instead and he has to work with the parasite to hide from both humans and parasites. It’s an interesting mix of body horror and exploring morality.

My Hero Academia by Kohei Horikoshi. It’s about a superhero school in world where more people have superpowers and being a superhero is partly being a celebrity and partly a government job.

Space Battle Lunch Time by Natalie Riess. It’s about a cooking reality tv show in space. I was a lot of fun and very cute. It does a good job of having multiple rounds of cooking contests without getting repetitive. The main character is super charming.

Moonlighters by Katie Schenkel and Cal Moray. An all ages comic about werewolves doing magical odd jobs on their college campus.

Soupy Leave Home by Cecil Castellucci and Jose Pimenta. I picked this up because I introduced Cecil and Jose to each other. Their book is really good. It’s about a girl who disguises herself as a boy so she can run away to ride the rails as a hobo during the great depression. It’s bitter sweet and does an excellent job showing the relationship build between Soupy and her mentor on the rails.

I also liked Castoffs by MK Reed, Brain Smith, and Molly Ostertag and Letters for Lucardo by Noora Heikkilä but those both are only at volume 1 and I feel like the stuff that I’ll really want to talk about will probably happen in volume 2. My reading list is organized shortest to longest and so some have been on there for awhile. For 2018 far it’s:

As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gilman

Not Drunk Enough by Tess Stone

The Fifth Beatle by Vivek Tiwary, Kyle Baker, and Andrew C. Robinson

Vattu vol 2 by Evan Dahm

The Last Halloween by Abby Howard

East of West year 2 by Jonathan Hichman and Nick Dragotta

Drive by Dave Kellet

The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal by EK Weaver

I Am Hero by Shinsuke Sato

If you all got recommendations I’m open to em. I think it’s important to read comic if you want to improve. So while I am gearing up for my next big project I wanted to make sure knew what was out there. I have been writing about them on Patreon but I’m gonna start posting them publicly. Writing about the stuff I like is just to help me articulate what I’m looking for in stories and be more deliberate in the future. I’m intentionally not reading Marvel and DC though. So if you suggest stuff from them I’ll probably pass.

And then here are more general personal goals and experiments.

I got really unhealthy while working on Misfits of Avalon because juggling two comics isn’t super smart when when has a hard deadline. There were a few months while working on it where I basically drank ALL THE REDBULL to finish on time. I also gained 20 lbs while working on it. So a lot of 2017 was me trying to undo the damage caused by overworking.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to my weight and mostly noticed because I got faced with the choice of lose weight or buy new clothes. Excising takes more work but is cheaper. So I started biking 3 times a week and used the biking version of couch to 5k to improve. I mostly stuck with it because MK Reed was my biking buddy. We fell off a few times when con season got hectic. Then because of con season I tried to think of something that is easier to do while away. So in October after all my cons were done I gave jogging a try. I wanted to die and my throat was closing up. I couldn’t finish even half of what couch to 5k tells you to do the first day. I thought maybe I’d improve. But after no improvement for a month I went to the doctor. Turns out my lungs are all fucked up and I just didn’t know it because that was how I always breathed. Doctor gave me an inhaler which helped with running so now I can completely the first day of the program, but my none running breathing is still not as good as it should be. So I just got a different inhaler that is supposed to help with that. Otherwise I might have some expensive medical tests coming up. So fingers crossed that everything is fine.

I also tried to do some push ups at the beginning of the year. I started by doing them off my counter and then moved lower to the arm rest of my couch. But I was apparently doing them wrong so I never successfully got to doing push ups off the floor. Building muscle strength might be something I need more help with than cardio.

And while running sucks honestly the hardest thing to do was fix how bad my caffeine addiction got. I mentioned above that I drank a lot of Redbull when Misfit of Avalon deadlines got tight. Well, when I went to C2E2 last year, the time it took me to wake up, go to the airport, fly to Chicago, and get to where I was staying gave me a withdrawal headache. So less than 24 hours. I still had 2-3 months of work to do on Misfits but I made a self note that this is a problem I needed to deal with once finished. So I turned in my pages that June. Then I quit caffeine cold turkey because I’m very bad at cutting back on things. It was a miserable two weeks. But by the time SDCC rolled around I could get through a con day with only one cup (as opposed to like 6 cups).

So for health stuff in 2018, I’m gonna try to keep up the jogging and biking. Figure out what is up with my lungs. And try to get help on the upper body strength that I am lacking.

[ronijashworth]

How to Write an Incredible Title Tag

The humble title tag. Probably the single most important 50-60 characters of that piece of content you’ve written. 

Perhaps you’ve found this post because you’ve spent hours pouring your soul into a piece of writing and now you’ve realised people will only read it if you write a good 50-60 characters. Or maybe it’s just that your boss told you that he needs quick wins for your product pages and so you’re turning in desperation to the ol’ title tag. Writing a good title tag is part art, part science.  How do you do it?

We’ll start with some quick basics for beginners. If you’re looking for the split test results, fun processes & all the more advanced things, scroll down two sections. Nothing to see here.

Contents

What is a title tag?

How long should a title tag be?

What do we want a title tag to do?

How to write a title tag for a single article

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

How much impact do title tag changes have?

7 learnings from title tag split tests

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

Summary

What is a title tag?

The title tag of a page is the HTML tag which is used to summarise the content of your webpage. It’ll be used by search engines as the title in search:

Yes, I’m using my own post as an example...

In your browser tab:

And even as a fallback in social sharing posts:

It isn’t the same thing as the on-page title! An on-page title could be written as a variation of your title tag, or something completely different. If we take a look at the article I’m using as an example we can see that the brand isn’t on the on-page title.

Title tag: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query | Distilled

On-page title: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query

If you want a more severe example take a look at this Redbull article.

How long should a title tag be?

A title tag should typically be 50-60 characters. Technically Google's maximum size is 600px. This usually works out at about 50-60 characters.

What do we want a title tag to do?

Welcome back, experienced people. What do we want our title tags to do?

Summarise our page: Our title should summarise the general thrust of our page. Google is going to use it to understand what our page is about.

Get people to click: It’s what users are going to see in the SERP. We need to convince people to pick us.

And if we just do one, you usually don’t get the best results. For example, using the title from the blog post above:

Totally factual: A Guide on Log Analysis.

All click: 6 Easy Steps to Log Analysis They Don’t Want You To Know.

We want to maximise how clicky our titles are without… you know… lying, mentioning that one trick dentists hate and crucially without compromising on summarising the page.

The title is primarily for people arriving on your site from Google. We’re not trying to pull people in who are idling. Those people are on Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram etc. (I know we did mention above that the title can sometimes be for social, but you can overwrite that if you’d like!)

The audience for your title is someone searching with an intent & that always comes first.

The process is quite different now depending on if you’re writing for a single article, or a template. 

How to write a title tag for a single article

Step 1 - Write the article

Write the article. It’s far easier to write a title when you know what you’ve written about. (This is assuming you know what you’re writing about, otherwise, sometimes headline writing can be a good way to generate ideas.)

Step 2 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the article

Pull out the primary purpose/point of the article. No clickiness yet, just the factual summary.

Example

Example post 1- A guide to log analysis

Example post 2: There is an industry backlash against Flybe’s government bailout

Step 3 - Find the factual, commonly searched keywords needed to describe the topic

Try to summarise what someone might search to find your article. Aim for the simplest most basic version of it. Search that term, take the top 5-10 articles which rank for it, plug them into a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge etc. and download all the keywords those articles rank for.

If the top 5-10 articles look nothing like yours either:

You’re first to a topic (unlikely, but possible)

Or your phrase is wrong, try again.

Once you’re happy with the phrase, take that big list of keywords and look for any other commonly occurring phrases you’re missing and take note.

Example

We’re going to continue using my old article on log analysis as an example. Because it doesn’t have a great title...

First search phrase pick: “log analysis” 

If we look up this keyword these are the top articles (only 3 shown below). Clearly we can see here that none of these articles are about search log analysis, I probably need to change my keyword:

Second search phrase pick: “seo log analysis”

Yep, that search result looks far better. We’ve still got a short phrase, but now the articles are now on topic with my own:

Excellent. Now:

Let’s take all the URLs that rank in the top 5-10.

Download the keywords they rank  for. (Ahrefs, SEMRush, Sistrix etc.)

And then get the most common keywords from that list. This ngrams tool is a nice way to do it. We get:

word frequency log 164 analysis 65 file 56 analyzer 41 server 40 logs 29 grep 13 analyze 13 access 12 excel 11

If we pull out the big generic words which would also apply to my article we get:

Log

Analysis

File

And possibly also:

Server

Step 4 - Writing lots of titles

Process

Now we’ve got all the factual words we’ll want in our title and brand.

What inspiration can we get for the clicky part? Lets quickly blast through a couple:

Writing an emotional headline:

Fear

Surprise

Anger

Disgust

Affirmation

Adding numbers:

Number of items in a list

Price

Date

Shameless clickbait inspiration:

Adding in mindblowing adverbs

The word “actually”

Being unreasonably specific

Then we try to write as many headlines as we can, but without trading away our relevance and factual keywords. 

When I started I worked with Hannah Smith on several projects. I remember her beating into us - “Write 20 titles. 20 is really hard.” Most of them will suck, but you’ll force yourself to be creative and somewhere there might be gold.

Example

Back to our previous example.

We’ve got our important factual words. We also know we want SEO as without that the intent of results shown wasn’t correct. Together those 4 words (without server) take up 18 characters. Which gives us roughly 32 characters left to play with. Let's also look at our current title and see what we’re working with:

A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with BigQuery | Distilled

Making it clicky 

Factual description 

Brand 

We can see I’ve used “Complete Guide” to try and make it clicky and that I’ve also put the method of analysis “BigQuery” into the title. Both of these we could definitely play around with. Now we just try to write as many titles as we can.

“A Guide to SEO Log File Analysis | Distilled”

“What is a log file and why is it helpful for SEO? | Distilled”

“6 Stage SEO Log File Analysis - A Complete Guide | Distilled”

“How to do an SEO log file analysis | Distilled”

“SEO Log File Analysis - The most important technical analysis | Distilled”

“5 Ways to Analyse Log Files for SEO You Didn’t Know | Distilled”

“Logging in the SEO jungles of the internet | Distilled”

“Log analysis is the technical audit you should be doing | Distilled”

“Stop wasting your time crawling and look at the logs | Distilled”

“Log analysis for SEO in 2020 | Distilled”

“Server Log Analysis Guide - SEO For Large Websites | Distilled”

I started with the restrictions and gradually just ignored them in my attempt to get to 20 titles. I didn’t get there. Sorry Hannah.

Step 5 - Picking one

How do we decide which is best? 

Honestly, it’s savagely hard to pick the right title by yourself. Of all the title tag tests we’ve run at Distilled, only one in five is typically positive. When I first started in search, I thought titles were the easy win. About a year and a half of running endless title tag split tests and I’m no longer convinced.

If you can test it. The two easiest ways for a single article are:

Paying for it: If you’ve got the budget, you could run paid social media campaigns and see which title performs best.

Friends & Colleagues: Make a poll for your friends & colleagues and get them to vote.

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

The above process works great if all you need to write is a single title.

But if you’ve got a template with hundreds of thousands of pages, then you can’t really do that. Well, you could, but it would be exhausting. Instead, we’re going to need a format for a title that we can apply to all our pages, to make our template shine. That previous process won’t cut it.

Step 1 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the page

We’re going to start by trying to summarise the attributes of the page in as much detail as possible. This will give us an idea of what pieces of detail we can pull into our titles across our template.

Example

I’ve pulled two page templates from rightmove.co.uk (this isn’t every page template but we’re keeping it simple):

Properties for sale - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Houses & flats

Number of properties: 3,940

Price range: £190,000 - £3.5 million

Numbers of property types:

269 detached

851 semi detached

690 terraced

Properties to rent - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Flats

Number of properties: 7,155

Price range: £75 - £34,667 per month

Numbers of property types:

238 detached

864 semi detached

1,770 terraced

Step 2 - Figure out what searches should return our template

Our templated page matches a specific intent. We need to figure out how to represent that in a title tag. 

Two things make this hard:

We might have multiple templates with similar intents.

The pages in our template may be similar.

We need to try and make a title which:

Differentiates our template from other templates.

Differentiates pages in our template from each other.

If we’re really struggling perhaps these pages shouldn’t even exist. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Example

We have two templates:

For sale

To rent

In this case, it’s pretty simple. For sale & to rent are clearly the important keywords we need to keep each template different. We can see that by looking at the SERPs. Changing those keywords, changes the results from for sale to rent.

Within our template, we have lots of different locations.

Properties for sale in Manchester

Properties for sale in Ipswich

 In order to keep the pages in our template different, we’re going to need the location in the title.

Step 3 - Accept that it’s messy

But anytime you work with titles it’s going to get messy.

Take our previous example. Rightmove actually has pages for Manchester & Greater Manchester. One ranks for properties and the other for flats. Something is clearly going on there. Uh oh.

Should that change what we do?

When we’re working at scale, patterns are going to breakdown. There hopefully is an underlying pattern, but look long enough and you’ll find exceptions. All we can do is do our best. Make a reasonable guess at what is going on and spoiler for stage 6. Test.

Step 4 - Are there any common phrases we’re missing?

This is exactly the same as step 3 for articles. 

Take your phrase which summarises the page.

Search for it. Download all the keywords the top 5-10 results rank for.

Find the most common words.

Example

To keep it brief, we’re going to just stick with the properties for sale template for the rest of these steps! Running this example with the top phrases for “properties for sale in manchester” we get:

Keyword Frequency manchester 211 sale 122 for 107 for sale 96 houses 59 house 45 buy 42 sale manchester 40 houses for 36 property 32

Words to note here are all fairly self-explanatory:

Property

Houses

Buy

Step 5 - What can we add to make it more attractive?

We know what we need to include to make the intent of our page clear.

Property/houses

For sale/To rent

Location

Now let's use that as a base and write as many titles as possible.  

We want to:

Make them as clicky as possible.

Use extra attributes.

Get creative.

Avoid using words which might change search intent.

A general difference between this and individual articles: If you end up with an entirely factual template title that is far more acceptable here than with an individual article.

Generic ideas for things you can put in titles

Adding prices into the title.

Adding some sort of quantity into the title. 

Adding year into the title. 

Put in the obvious e.g. “online” in an online shop.

Popular synonyms.

Words to watch out for that can change an intent

Comparison style words - best, compare etc. 

Deal seeking words: cheapest, cheap, deal, affordable

Example

Let’s have a go at writing titles for our category pages

Our base is:

Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Let’s make variants:

Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,000+ Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Properties for Sale - Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale Across Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses for Sale in Manchester - Get there first | Rightmove

3,940 Properties for Sale in Manchester - Find your Happy | Rightmove

That’s a lot of variations. We even managed to fit in their tag line at the end.

Step 5 - Pick a title

Process

Just like with articles we’re going to end up with a list of titles and unsure which one will be best. Far more than with individual title tags, it’s really really important to split test.

Template level title tags are messy. We’ve already seen that in our example. You can make educated guesses from performing some large scale analysis, but there are going to be effects you miss. 

What works on one site won’t work on another & we’ve found only 1 in 5 title tags ends up being positive.

The stakes are often higher. We’re not changing one page, we’re changing a group of pages which is often a non-trivial amount of your search traffic.

If you can test at all I’d highly recommend it. We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started. The two most useful should be:

What is SEO split testing 

DIY SEO split testing tool

If you can’t test, you can at least lean on our tests, I’ve got results from those in the next section.

Important context for our title tag split tests

We’re lucky enough at Distilled to have access to SEO split testing software we built. It lets us test different titles & accurately measure the impact on organic traffic. We’re about to talk about the different results we’ve learned, so it’s important to briefly talk about the assumptions implicit in these results.

You can only run SEO split tests on large groups of similar pages (e.g. all category pages, all listing pages etc.) and that means our results are from certain types of websites:

The websites are mostly large and authoritative. 

They tend to be in competitive SERPs.

The companies usually have SEO teams who have done the basics. There usually isn’t anything glaringly awful like product pages without titles that we can fix.

They are more typically tests applied to template pages like category, product & listing pages rather than blog pages. (Although that’s not everything, we run split tests on the Moz blog for example!)

I think you can learn a huge amount from these tests, but it’s still important to bear those assumptions in mind.

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

Writing titles is really hard. We mentioned this above, but let's look at our numbers in slightly more detail. We’ve run many title tag tests across different industries. Our results break down as follows:

Successes: 22%

Null: 38%

Failures: 40%

Oof. 78% of the time title tag tests fall flat or actually harm the website. That makes testing super important. It’s not impossible you could work on a website where you never have a positive title tag test. Nothing you try will ever work. Without testing, you’d probably still roll out those titles. Just spotting the failures and not rolling them out will save you a huge amount of traffic.

With a single article, this isn’t so worrying, you’ve got a far larger creative space to play in and if it does go wrong, it’s a far smaller proportion of your traffic.

If you’re changing titles on big page templates, please make sure you test them!

How much impact do title tag changes have?

Broadly most title tag tests have an impact between 4-15% in either direction.

You can see a distribution of our title tag tests below.

7 learnings from title tag split tests

Most title tag changes are unique to a website, changing words and phrases which don't generalise well from website to website. However, there are some more common patterns we’ve been able to test.

Putting in prices

50% of our title tag tests involving adding the price into the title have been positive. Not only do we get to put a number into the title, but it also provides more information.

Why was it null or negative the rest of the time? 

Our consultant Emily Potter thinks this is down to whether or not Google can find the price you put in the title on the rest of your page - i.e. are you being honest about price. We also think it may make a difference depending on how competitive you are on price.

Putting in year numbers

We haven’t had the chance to test this a huge number of times, but so far this change has been positive in the niches where we’ve done it. The shameless putting 2019, 2020 in the title has helped.

Shortening title tags hasn’t actually been that helpful

When you have lots of automatically generated titles, it’s common to end up with titles that are too long.

We’ve run a number of tests about shortening these titles and nearly all of them have been null (~80%). They’ve also never been positive. Our best current theory is that the templates which often end up with long title tags are typically attracting long tail traffic. When they are truncated, they’re still the only relevant result and so continue to rank, perhaps for long tail queries, keyword stuffing isn’t a problem.

Having said that I’d still say it’s worth trying to shorten your titles. If you manage to cut 4-5 characters from your title with no effect, you could use that space to add price or something else which may have an effect.

Emojis didn’t work

We’ve run several tests to put emojis into title tags and so far it hasn’t helped. Sorry folks :(

I mean c’mon. Marketers can barely be trusted with FAQ schema, can you imagine what we’d do to Emojis.

Eye-grabbing on category/listing pages

We’ve tried some title tags for category/listing pages which were very different, actively calling out to the user in the SERPs.

Standard: Ford for Sale | CarShop

Example of our type of test: You there! Fords for Sale at the CarShop

These did not work. 

Localising language

We tested using localised versions of phrases. This wasn’t single letter changes (like s for z in UK vs US), but entire words e.g. pants instead of trousers.

This was notably positive (~20-25%).

Removing implied words from the title

We’ve seen mixed results from this. We ran a split test & found removing “online” from title tags had no effect on one particular client. Outside of our split-testing platform for a different client, we removed the word “online” from the title of an online store.

Our rankings for the terms including "online", dropped and we quickly put it back in.

More detail on the split tests

If you want to hear more detail about some of these tests, or just love video and you’re signed up to DistilledU, you can see Emily Potter's video on split testing from last year. If you’re not subscribed, you can see my slightly older talk here.

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

We usually see the impact of a title tag in 3-5 days.  We’ve had a couple which has taken longer, but this is the majority. The previous caveats are of course important here, we typically work on larger websites, which are heavily crawled.

Summary

I genuinely thought when I started I’d be able to get this post done in 1000 words. Even now, I can see all the little bits of context & other things that go into writing a good title, which I just couldn’t fit into this post. We didn’t even start talking about internal politics :)

But hopefully, this has got you on your way. Now let's hear some stories.

What title tag tests have you found effective? What’s the worst title tag you’ve ever tried?

from Digital Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-write-an-incredible-title-tag/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[insufferablemonsters]

anyone notice how you can’t tag more than five people? has it always been that way or is that new because that’s annoying 😂

[dillenwaeraa]

How to Write an Incredible Title Tag

The humble title tag. Probably the single most important 50-60 characters of that piece of content you’ve written. 

Perhaps you’ve found this post because you’ve spent hours pouring your soul into a piece of writing and now you’ve realised people will only read it if you write a good 50-60 characters. Or maybe it’s just that your boss told you that he needs quick wins for your product pages and so you’re turning in desperation to the ol’ title tag. Writing a good title tag is part art, part science.  How do you do it?

We’ll start with some quick basics for beginners. If you’re looking for the split test results, fun processes & all the more advanced things, scroll down two sections. Nothing to see here.

Contents

What is a title tag?

How long should a title tag be?

What do we want a title tag to do?

How to write a title tag for a single article

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

How much impact do title tag changes have?

7 learnings from title tag split tests

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

Summary

What is a title tag?

The title tag of a page is the HTML tag which is used to summarise the content of your webpage. It’ll be used by search engines as the title in search:

Yes, I’m using my own post as an example...

In your browser tab:

And even as a fallback in social sharing posts:

It isn’t the same thing as the on-page title! An on-page title could be written as a variation of your title tag, or something completely different. If we take a look at the article I’m using as an example we can see that the brand isn’t on the on-page title.

Title tag: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query | Distilled

On-page title: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query

If you want a more severe example take a look at this Redbull article.

How long should a title tag be?

A title tag should typically be 50-60 characters. Technically Google's maximum size is 600px. This usually works out at about 50-60 characters.

What do we want a title tag to do?

Welcome back, experienced people. What do we want our title tags to do?

Summarise our page: Our title should summarise the general thrust of our page. Google is going to use it to understand what our page is about.

Get people to click: It’s what users are going to see in the SERP. We need to convince people to pick us.

And if we just do one, you usually don’t get the best results. For example, using the title from the blog post above:

Totally factual: A Guide on Log Analysis.

All click: 6 Easy Steps to Log Analysis They Don’t Want You To Know.

We want to maximise how clicky our titles are without… you know… lying, mentioning that one trick dentists hate and crucially without compromising on summarising the page.

The title is primarily for people arriving on your site from Google. We’re not trying to pull people in who are idling. Those people are on Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram etc. (I know we did mention above that the title can sometimes be for social, but you can overwrite that if you’d like!)

The audience for your title is someone searching with an intent & that always comes first.

The process is quite different now depending on if you’re writing for a single article, or a template. 

How to write a title tag for a single article

Step 1 - Write the article

Write the article. It’s far easier to write a title when you know what you’ve written about. (This is assuming you know what you’re writing about, otherwise, sometimes headline writing can be a good way to generate ideas.)

Step 2 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the article

Pull out the primary purpose/point of the article. No clickiness yet, just the factual summary.

Example

Example post 1- A guide to log analysis

Example post 2: There is an industry backlash against Flybe’s government bailout

Step 3 - Find the factual, commonly searched keywords needed to describe the topic

Try to summarise what someone might search to find your article. Aim for the simplest most basic version of it. Search that term, take the top 5-10 articles which rank for it, plug them into a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge etc. and download all the keywords those articles rank for.

If the top 5-10 articles look nothing like yours either:

You’re first to a topic (unlikely, but possible)

Or your phrase is wrong, try again.

Once you’re happy with the phrase, take that big list of keywords and look for any other commonly occurring phrases you’re missing and take note.

Example

We’re going to continue using my old article on log analysis as an example. Because it doesn’t have a great title...

First search phrase pick: “log analysis” 

If we look up this keyword these are the top articles (only 3 shown below). Clearly we can see here that none of these articles are about search log analysis, I probably need to change my keyword:

Second search phrase pick: “seo log analysis”

Yep, that search result looks far better. We’ve still got a short phrase, but now the articles are now on topic with my own:

Excellent. Now:

Let’s take all the URLs that rank in the top 5-10.

Download the keywords they rank  for. (Ahrefs, SEMRush, Sistrix etc.)

And then get the most common keywords from that list. This ngrams tool is a nice way to do it. We get:

word frequency log 164 analysis 65 file 56 analyzer 41 server 40 logs 29 grep 13 analyze 13 access 12 excel 11

If we pull out the big generic words which would also apply to my article we get:

Log

Analysis

File

And possibly also:

Server

Step 4 - Writing lots of titles

Process

Now we’ve got all the factual words we’ll want in our title and brand.

What inspiration can we get for the clicky part? Lets quickly blast through a couple:

Writing an emotional headline:

Fear

Surprise

Anger

Disgust

Affirmation

Adding numbers:

Number of items in a list

Price

Date

Shameless clickbait inspiration:

Adding in mindblowing adverbs

The word “actually”

Being unreasonably specific

Then we try to write as many headlines as we can, but without trading away our relevance and factual keywords. 

When I started I worked with Hannah Smith on several projects. I remember her beating into us - “Write 20 titles. 20 is really hard.” Most of them will suck, but you’ll force yourself to be creative and somewhere there might be gold.

Example

Back to our previous example.

We’ve got our important factual words. We also know we want SEO as without that the intent of results shown wasn’t correct. Together those 4 words (without server) take up 18 characters. Which gives us roughly 32 characters left to play with. Let's also look at our current title and see what we’re working with:

A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with BigQuery | Distilled

Making it clicky 

Factual description 

Brand 

We can see I’ve used “Complete Guide” to try and make it clicky and that I’ve also put the method of analysis “BigQuery” into the title. Both of these we could definitely play around with. Now we just try to write as many titles as we can.

“A Guide to SEO Log File Analysis | Distilled”

“What is a log file and why is it helpful for SEO? | Distilled”

“6 Stage SEO Log File Analysis - A Complete Guide | Distilled”

“How to do an SEO log file analysis | Distilled”

“SEO Log File Analysis - The most important technical analysis | Distilled”

“5 Ways to Analyse Log Files for SEO You Didn’t Know | Distilled”

“Logging in the SEO jungles of the internet | Distilled”

“Log analysis is the technical audit you should be doing | Distilled”

“Stop wasting your time crawling and look at the logs | Distilled”

“Log analysis for SEO in 2020 | Distilled”

“Server Log Analysis Guide - SEO For Large Websites | Distilled”

I started with the restrictions and gradually just ignored them in my attempt to get to 20 titles. I didn’t get there. Sorry Hannah.

Step 5 - Picking one

How do we decide which is best? 

Honestly, it’s savagely hard to pick the right title by yourself. Of all the title tag tests we’ve run at Distilled, only one in five is typically positive. When I first started in search, I thought titles were the easy win. About a year and a half of running endless title tag split tests and I’m no longer convinced.

If you can test it. The two easiest ways for a single article are:

Paying for it: If you’ve got the budget, you could run paid social media campaigns and see which title performs best.

Friends & Colleagues: Make a poll for your friends & colleagues and get them to vote.

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

The above process works great if all you need to write is a single title.

But if you’ve got a template with hundreds of thousands of pages, then you can’t really do that. Well, you could, but it would be exhausting. Instead, we’re going to need a format for a title that we can apply to all our pages, to make our template shine. That previous process won’t cut it.

Step 1 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the page

We’re going to start by trying to summarise the attributes of the page in as much detail as possible. This will give us an idea of what pieces of detail we can pull into our titles across our template.

Example

I’ve pulled two page templates from rightmove.co.uk (this isn’t every page template but we’re keeping it simple):

Properties for sale - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Houses & flats

Number of properties: 3,940

Price range: £190,000 - £3.5 million

Numbers of property types:

269 detached

851 semi detached

690 terraced

Properties to rent - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Flats

Number of properties: 7,155

Price range: £75 - £34,667 per month

Numbers of property types:

238 detached

864 semi detached

1,770 terraced

Step 2 - Figure out what searches should return our template

Our templated page matches a specific intent. We need to figure out how to represent that in a title tag. 

Two things make this hard:

We might have multiple templates with similar intents.

The pages in our template may be similar.

We need to try and make a title which:

Differentiates our template from other templates.

Differentiates pages in our template from each other.

If we’re really struggling perhaps these pages shouldn’t even exist. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Example

We have two templates:

For sale

To rent

In this case, it’s pretty simple. For sale & to rent are clearly the important keywords we need to keep each template different. We can see that by looking at the SERPs. Changing those keywords, changes the results from for sale to rent.

Within our template, we have lots of different locations.

Properties for sale in Manchester

Properties for sale in Ipswich

 In order to keep the pages in our template different, we’re going to need the location in the title.

Step 3 - Accept that it’s messy

But anytime you work with titles it’s going to get messy.

Take our previous example. Rightmove actually has pages for Manchester & Greater Manchester. One ranks for properties and the other for flats. Something is clearly going on there. Uh oh.

Should that change what we do?

When we’re working at scale, patterns are going to breakdown. There hopefully is an underlying pattern, but look long enough and you’ll find exceptions. All we can do is do our best. Make a reasonable guess at what is going on and spoiler for stage 6. Test.

Step 4 - Are there any common phrases we’re missing?

This is exactly the same as step 3 for articles. 

Take your phrase which summarises the page.

Search for it. Download all the keywords the top 5-10 results rank for.

Find the most common words.

Example

To keep it brief, we’re going to just stick with the properties for sale template for the rest of these steps! Running this example with the top phrases for “properties for sale in manchester” we get:

Keyword Frequency manchester 211 sale 122 for 107 for sale 96 houses 59 house 45 buy 42 sale manchester 40 houses for 36 property 32

Words to note here are all fairly self-explanatory:

Property

Houses

Buy

Step 5 - What can we add to make it more attractive?

We know what we need to include to make the intent of our page clear.

Property/houses

For sale/To rent

Location

Now let's use that as a base and write as many titles as possible.  

We want to:

Make them as clicky as possible.

Use extra attributes.

Get creative.

Avoid using words which might change search intent.

A general difference between this and individual articles: If you end up with an entirely factual template title that is far more acceptable here than with an individual article.

Generic ideas for things you can put in titles

Adding prices into the title.

Adding some sort of quantity into the title. 

Adding year into the title. 

Put in the obvious e.g. “online” in an online shop.

Popular synonyms.

Words to watch out for that can change an intent

Comparison style words - best, compare etc. 

Deal seeking words: cheapest, cheap, deal, affordable

Example

Let’s have a go at writing titles for our category pages

Our base is:

Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Let’s make variants:

Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,000+ Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Properties for Sale - Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale Across Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses for Sale in Manchester - Get there first | Rightmove

3,940 Properties for Sale in Manchester - Find your Happy | Rightmove

That’s a lot of variations. We even managed to fit in their tag line at the end.

Step 5 - Pick a title

Process

Just like with articles we’re going to end up with a list of titles and unsure which one will be best. Far more than with individual title tags, it’s really really important to split test.

Template level title tags are messy. We’ve already seen that in our example. You can make educated guesses from performing some large scale analysis, but there are going to be effects you miss. 

What works on one site won’t work on another & we’ve found only 1 in 5 title tags ends up being positive.

The stakes are often higher. We’re not changing one page, we’re changing a group of pages which is often a non-trivial amount of your search traffic.

If you can test at all I’d highly recommend it. We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started. The two most useful should be:

What is SEO split testing 

DIY SEO split testing tool

If you can’t test, you can at least lean on our tests, I’ve got results from those in the next section.

Important context for our title tag split tests

We’re lucky enough at Distilled to have access to SEO split testing software we built. It lets us test different titles & accurately measure the impact on organic traffic. We’re about to talk about the different results we’ve learned, so it’s important to briefly talk about the assumptions implicit in these results.

You can only run SEO split tests on large groups of similar pages (e.g. all category pages, all listing pages etc.) and that means our results are from certain types of websites:

The websites are mostly large and authoritative. 

They tend to be in competitive SERPs.

The companies usually have SEO teams who have done the basics. There usually isn’t anything glaringly awful like product pages without titles that we can fix.

They are more typically tests applied to template pages like category, product & listing pages rather than blog pages. (Although that’s not everything, we run split tests on the Moz blog for example!)

I think you can learn a huge amount from these tests, but it’s still important to bear those assumptions in mind.

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

Writing titles is really hard. We mentioned this above, but let's look at our numbers in slightly more detail. We’ve run many title tag tests across different industries. Our results break down as follows:

Successes: 22%

Null: 38%

Failures: 40%

Oof. 78% of the time title tag tests fall flat or actually harm the website. That makes testing super important. It’s not impossible you could work on a website where you never have a positive title tag test. Nothing you try will ever work. Without testing, you’d probably still roll out those titles. Just spotting the failures and not rolling them out will save you a huge amount of traffic.

With a single article, this isn’t so worrying, you’ve got a far larger creative space to play in and if it does go wrong, it’s a far smaller proportion of your traffic.

If you’re changing titles on big page templates, please make sure you test them!

How much impact do title tag changes have?

Broadly most title tag tests have an impact between 4-15% in either direction.

You can see a distribution of our title tag tests below.

7 learnings from title tag split tests

Most title tag changes are unique to a website, changing words and phrases which don't generalise well from website to website. However, there are some more common patterns we’ve been able to test.

Putting in prices

50% of our title tag tests involving adding the price into the title have been positive. Not only do we get to put a number into the title, but it also provides more information.

Why was it null or negative the rest of the time? 

Our consultant Emily Potter thinks this is down to whether or not Google can find the price you put in the title on the rest of your page - i.e. are you being honest about price. We also think it may make a difference depending on how competitive you are on price.

Putting in year numbers

We haven’t had the chance to test this a huge number of times, but so far this change has been positive in the niches where we’ve done it. The shameless putting 2019, 2020 in the title has helped.

Shortening title tags hasn’t actually been that helpful

When you have lots of automatically generated titles, it’s common to end up with titles that are too long.

We’ve run a number of tests about shortening these titles and nearly all of them have been null (~80%). They’ve also never been positive. Our best current theory is that the templates which often end up with long title tags are typically attracting long tail traffic. When they are truncated, they’re still the only relevant result and so continue to rank, perhaps for long tail queries, keyword stuffing isn’t a problem.

Having said that I’d still say it’s worth trying to shorten your titles. If you manage to cut 4-5 characters from your title with no effect, you could use that space to add price or something else which may have an effect.

Emojis didn’t work

We’ve run several tests to put emojis into title tags and so far it hasn’t helped. Sorry folks :(

I mean c’mon. Marketers can barely be trusted with FAQ schema, can you imagine what we’d do to Emojis.

Eye-grabbing on category/listing pages

We’ve tried some title tags for category/listing pages which were very different, actively calling out to the user in the SERPs.

Standard: Ford for Sale | CarShop

Example of our type of test: You there! Fords for Sale at the CarShop

These did not work. 

Localising language

We tested using localised versions of phrases. This wasn’t single letter changes (like s for z in UK vs US), but entire words e.g. pants instead of trousers.

This was notably positive (~20-25%).

Removing implied words from the title

We’ve seen mixed results from this. We ran a split test & found removing “online” from title tags had no effect on one particular client. Outside of our split-testing platform for a different client, we removed the word “online” from the title of an online store.

Our rankings for the terms including "online", dropped and we quickly put it back in.

More detail on the split tests

If you want to hear more detail about some of these tests, or just love video and you’re signed up to DistilledU, you can see Emily Potter's video on split testing from last year. If you’re not subscribed, you can see my slightly older talk here.

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

We usually see the impact of a title tag in 3-5 days.  We’ve had a couple which has taken longer, but this is the majority. The previous caveats are of course important here, we typically work on larger websites, which are heavily crawled.

Summary

I genuinely thought when I started I’d be able to get this post done in 1000 words. Even now, I can see all the little bits of context & other things that go into writing a good title, which I just couldn’t fit into this post. We didn’t even start talking about internal politics :)

But hopefully, this has got you on your way. Now let's hear some stories.

What title tag tests have you found effective? What’s the worst title tag you’ve ever tried?

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-write-an-incredible-title-tag/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[davidrsmithlove]

How to Write an Incredible Title Tag

The humble title tag. Probably the single most important 50-60 characters of that piece of content you’ve written. 

Perhaps you’ve found this post because you’ve spent hours pouring your soul into a piece of writing and now you’ve realised people will only read it if you write a good 50-60 characters. Or maybe it’s just that your boss told you that he needs quick wins for your product pages and so you’re turning in desperation to the ol’ title tag. Writing a good title tag is part art, part science.  How do you do it?

We’ll start with some quick basics for beginners. If you’re looking for the split test results, fun processes & all the more advanced things, scroll down two sections. Nothing to see here.

Contents

What is a title tag?

How long should a title tag be?

What do we want a title tag to do?

How to write a title tag for a single article

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

How much impact do title tag changes have?

7 learnings from title tag split tests

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

Summary

What is a title tag?

The title tag of a page is the HTML tag which is used to summarise the content of your webpage. It’ll be used by search engines as the title in search:

Yes, I’m using my own post as an example...

In your browser tab:

And even as a fallback in social sharing posts:

It isn’t the same thing as the on-page title! An on-page title could be written as a variation of your title tag, or something completely different. If we take a look at the article I’m using as an example we can see that the brand isn’t on the on-page title.

Title tag: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query | Distilled

On-page title: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query

If you want a more severe example take a look at this Redbull article.

How long should a title tag be?

A title tag should typically be 50-60 characters. Technically Google's maximum size is 600px. This usually works out at about 50-60 characters.

What do we want a title tag to do?

Welcome back, experienced people. What do we want our title tags to do?

Summarise our page: Our title should summarise the general thrust of our page. Google is going to use it to understand what our page is about.

Get people to click: It’s what users are going to see in the SERP. We need to convince people to pick us.

And if we just do one, you usually don’t get the best results. For example, using the title from the blog post above:

Totally factual: A Guide on Log Analysis.

All click: 6 Easy Steps to Log Analysis They Don’t Want You To Know.

We want to maximise how clicky our titles are without… you know… lying, mentioning that one trick dentists hate and crucially without compromising on summarising the page.

The title is primarily for people arriving on your site from Google. We’re not trying to pull people in who are idling. Those people are on Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram etc. (I know we did mention above that the title can sometimes be for social, but you can overwrite that if you’d like!)

The audience for your title is someone searching with an intent & that always comes first.

The process is quite different now depending on if you’re writing for a single article, or a template. 

How to write a title tag for a single article

Step 1 - Write the article

Write the article. It’s far easier to write a title when you know what you’ve written about. (This is assuming you know what you’re writing about, otherwise, sometimes headline writing can be a good way to generate ideas.)

Step 2 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the article

Pull out the primary purpose/point of the article. No clickiness yet, just the factual summary.

Example

Example post 1- A guide to log analysis

Example post 2: There is an industry backlash against Flybe’s government bailout

Step 3 - Find the factual, commonly searched keywords needed to describe the topic

Try to summarise what someone might search to find your article. Aim for the simplest most basic version of it. Search that term, take the top 5-10 articles which rank for it, plug them into a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge etc. and download all the keywords those articles rank for.

If the top 5-10 articles look nothing like yours either:

You’re first to a topic (unlikely, but possible)

Or your phrase is wrong, try again.

Once you’re happy with the phrase, take that big list of keywords and look for any other commonly occurring phrases you’re missing and take note.

Example

We’re going to continue using my old article on log analysis as an example. Because it doesn’t have a great title...

First search phrase pick: “log analysis” 

If we look up this keyword these are the top articles (only 3 shown below). Clearly we can see here that none of these articles are about search log analysis, I probably need to change my keyword:

Second search phrase pick: “seo log analysis”

Yep, that search result looks far better. We’ve still got a short phrase, but now the articles are now on topic with my own:

Excellent. Now:

Let’s take all the URLs that rank in the top 5-10.

Download the keywords they rank  for. (Ahrefs, SEMRush, Sistrix etc.)

And then get the most common keywords from that list. This ngrams tool is a nice way to do it. We get:

word frequency log 164 analysis 65 file 56 analyzer 41 server 40 logs 29 grep 13 analyze 13 access 12 excel 11

If we pull out the big generic words which would also apply to my article we get:

Log

Analysis

File

And possibly also:

Server

Step 4 - Writing lots of titles

Process

Now we’ve got all the factual words we’ll want in our title and brand.

What inspiration can we get for the clicky part? Lets quickly blast through a couple:

Writing an emotional headline:

Fear

Surprise

Anger

Disgust

Affirmation

Adding numbers:

Number of items in a list

Price

Date

Shameless clickbait inspiration:

Adding in mindblowing adverbs

The word “actually”

Being unreasonably specific

Then we try to write as many headlines as we can, but without trading away our relevance and factual keywords. 

When I started I worked with Hannah Smith on several projects. I remember her beating into us - “Write 20 titles. 20 is really hard.” Most of them will suck, but you’ll force yourself to be creative and somewhere there might be gold.

Example

Back to our previous example.

We’ve got our important factual words. We also know we want SEO as without that the intent of results shown wasn’t correct. Together those 4 words (without server) take up 18 characters. Which gives us roughly 32 characters left to play with. Let's also look at our current title and see what we’re working with:

A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with BigQuery | Distilled

Making it clicky 

Factual description 

Brand 

We can see I’ve used “Complete Guide” to try and make it clicky and that I’ve also put the method of analysis “BigQuery” into the title. Both of these we could definitely play around with. Now we just try to write as many titles as we can.

“A Guide to SEO Log File Analysis | Distilled”

“What is a log file and why is it helpful for SEO? | Distilled”

“6 Stage SEO Log File Analysis - A Complete Guide | Distilled”

“How to do an SEO log file analysis | Distilled”

“SEO Log File Analysis - The most important technical analysis | Distilled”

“5 Ways to Analyse Log Files for SEO You Didn’t Know | Distilled”

“Logging in the SEO jungles of the internet | Distilled”

“Log analysis is the technical audit you should be doing | Distilled”

“Stop wasting your time crawling and look at the logs | Distilled”

“Log analysis for SEO in 2020 | Distilled”

“Server Log Analysis Guide - SEO For Large Websites | Distilled”

I started with the restrictions and gradually just ignored them in my attempt to get to 20 titles. I didn’t get there. Sorry Hannah.

Step 5 - Picking one

How do we decide which is best? 

Honestly, it’s savagely hard to pick the right title by yourself. Of all the title tag tests we’ve run at Distilled, only one in five is typically positive. When I first started in search, I thought titles were the easy win. About a year and a half of running endless title tag split tests and I’m no longer convinced.

If you can test it. The two easiest ways for a single article are:

Paying for it: If you’ve got the budget, you could run paid social media campaigns and see which title performs best.

Friends & Colleagues: Make a poll for your friends & colleagues and get them to vote.

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

The above process works great if all you need to write is a single title.

But if you’ve got a template with hundreds of thousands of pages, then you can’t really do that. Well, you could, but it would be exhausting. Instead, we’re going to need a format for a title that we can apply to all our pages, to make our template shine. That previous process won’t cut it.

Step 1 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the page

We’re going to start by trying to summarise the attributes of the page in as much detail as possible. This will give us an idea of what pieces of detail we can pull into our titles across our template.

Example

I’ve pulled two page templates from rightmove.co.uk (this isn’t every page template but we’re keeping it simple):

Properties for sale - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Houses & flats

Number of properties: 3,940

Price range: £190,000 - £3.5 million

Numbers of property types:

269 detached

851 semi detached

690 terraced

Properties to rent - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Flats

Number of properties: 7,155

Price range: £75 - £34,667 per month

Numbers of property types:

238 detached

864 semi detached

1,770 terraced

Step 2 - Figure out what searches should return our template

Our templated page matches a specific intent. We need to figure out how to represent that in a title tag. 

Two things make this hard:

We might have multiple templates with similar intents.

The pages in our template may be similar.

We need to try and make a title which:

Differentiates our template from other templates.

Differentiates pages in our template from each other.

If we’re really struggling perhaps these pages shouldn’t even exist. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Example

We have two templates:

For sale

To rent

In this case, it’s pretty simple. For sale & to rent are clearly the important keywords we need to keep each template different. We can see that by looking at the SERPs. Changing those keywords, changes the results from for sale to rent.

Within our template, we have lots of different locations.

Properties for sale in Manchester

Properties for sale in Ipswich

 In order to keep the pages in our template different, we’re going to need the location in the title.

Step 3 - Accept that it’s messy

But anytime you work with titles it’s going to get messy.

Take our previous example. Rightmove actually has pages for Manchester & Greater Manchester. One ranks for properties and the other for flats. Something is clearly going on there. Uh oh.

Should that change what we do?

When we’re working at scale, patterns are going to breakdown. There hopefully is an underlying pattern, but look long enough and you’ll find exceptions. All we can do is do our best. Make a reasonable guess at what is going on and spoiler for stage 6. Test.

Step 4 - Are there any common phrases we’re missing?

This is exactly the same as step 3 for articles. 

Take your phrase which summarises the page.

Search for it. Download all the keywords the top 5-10 results rank for.

Find the most common words.

Example

To keep it brief, we’re going to just stick with the properties for sale template for the rest of these steps! Running this example with the top phrases for “properties for sale in manchester” we get:

Keyword Frequency manchester 211 sale 122 for 107 for sale 96 houses 59 house 45 buy 42 sale manchester 40 houses for 36 property 32

Words to note here are all fairly self-explanatory:

Property

Houses

Buy

Step 5 - What can we add to make it more attractive?

We know what we need to include to make the intent of our page clear.

Property/houses

For sale/To rent

Location

Now let's use that as a base and write as many titles as possible.  

We want to:

Make them as clicky as possible.

Use extra attributes.

Get creative.

Avoid using words which might change search intent.

A general difference between this and individual articles: If you end up with an entirely factual template title that is far more acceptable here than with an individual article.

Generic ideas for things you can put in titles

Adding prices into the title.

Adding some sort of quantity into the title. 

Adding year into the title. 

Put in the obvious e.g. “online” in an online shop.

Popular synonyms.

Words to watch out for that can change an intent

Comparison style words - best, compare etc. 

Deal seeking words: cheapest, cheap, deal, affordable

Example

Let’s have a go at writing titles for our category pages

Our base is:

Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Let’s make variants:

Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,000+ Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Properties for Sale - Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale Across Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses for Sale in Manchester - Get there first | Rightmove

3,940 Properties for Sale in Manchester - Find your Happy | Rightmove

That’s a lot of variations. We even managed to fit in their tag line at the end.

Step 5 - Pick a title

Process

Just like with articles we’re going to end up with a list of titles and unsure which one will be best. Far more than with individual title tags, it’s really really important to split test.

Template level title tags are messy. We’ve already seen that in our example. You can make educated guesses from performing some large scale analysis, but there are going to be effects you miss. 

What works on one site won’t work on another & we’ve found only 1 in 5 title tags ends up being positive.

The stakes are often higher. We’re not changing one page, we’re changing a group of pages which is often a non-trivial amount of your search traffic.

If you can test at all I’d highly recommend it. We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started. The two most useful should be:

What is SEO split testing 

DIY SEO split testing tool

If you can’t test, you can at least lean on our tests, I’ve got results from those in the next section.

Important context for our title tag split tests

We’re lucky enough at Distilled to have access to SEO split testing software we built. It lets us test different titles & accurately measure the impact on organic traffic. We’re about to talk about the different results we’ve learned, so it’s important to briefly talk about the assumptions implicit in these results.

You can only run SEO split tests on large groups of similar pages (e.g. all category pages, all listing pages etc.) and that means our results are from certain types of websites:

The websites are mostly large and authoritative. 

They tend to be in competitive SERPs.

The companies usually have SEO teams who have done the basics. There usually isn’t anything glaringly awful like product pages without titles that we can fix.

They are more typically tests applied to template pages like category, product & listing pages rather than blog pages. (Although that’s not everything, we run split tests on the Moz blog for example!)

I think you can learn a huge amount from these tests, but it’s still important to bear those assumptions in mind.

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

Writing titles is really hard. We mentioned this above, but let's look at our numbers in slightly more detail. We’ve run many title tag tests across different industries. Our results break down as follows:

Successes: 22%

Null: 38%

Failures: 40%

Oof. 78% of the time title tag tests fall flat or actually harm the website. That makes testing super important. It’s not impossible you could work on a website where you never have a positive title tag test. Nothing you try will ever work. Without testing, you’d probably still roll out those titles. Just spotting the failures and not rolling them out will save you a huge amount of traffic.

With a single article, this isn’t so worrying, you’ve got a far larger creative space to play in and if it does go wrong, it’s a far smaller proportion of your traffic.

If you’re changing titles on big page templates, please make sure you test them!

How much impact do title tag changes have?

Broadly most title tag tests have an impact between 4-15% in either direction.

You can see a distribution of our title tag tests below.

7 learnings from title tag split tests

Most title tag changes are unique to a website, changing words and phrases which don't generalise well from website to website. However, there are some more common patterns we’ve been able to test.

Putting in prices

50% of our title tag tests involving adding the price into the title have been positive. Not only do we get to put a number into the title, but it also provides more information.

Why was it null or negative the rest of the time? 

Our consultant Emily Potter thinks this is down to whether or not Google can find the price you put in the title on the rest of your page - i.e. are you being honest about price. We also think it may make a difference depending on how competitive you are on price.

Putting in year numbers

We haven’t had the chance to test this a huge number of times, but so far this change has been positive in the niches where we’ve done it. The shameless putting 2019, 2020 in the title has helped.

Shortening title tags hasn’t actually been that helpful

When you have lots of automatically generated titles, it’s common to end up with titles that are too long.

We’ve run a number of tests about shortening these titles and nearly all of them have been null (~80%). They’ve also never been positive. Our best current theory is that the templates which often end up with long title tags are typically attracting long tail traffic. When they are truncated, they’re still the only relevant result and so continue to rank, perhaps for long tail queries, keyword stuffing isn’t a problem.

Having said that I’d still say it’s worth trying to shorten your titles. If you manage to cut 4-5 characters from your title with no effect, you could use that space to add price or something else which may have an effect.

Emojis didn’t work

We’ve run several tests to put emojis into title tags and so far it hasn’t helped. Sorry folks :(

I mean c’mon. Marketers can barely be trusted with FAQ schema, can you imagine what we’d do to Emojis.

Eye-grabbing on category/listing pages

We’ve tried some title tags for category/listing pages which were very different, actively calling out to the user in the SERPs.

Standard: Ford for Sale | CarShop

Example of our type of test: You there! Fords for Sale at the CarShop

These did not work. 

Localising language

We tested using localised versions of phrases. This wasn’t single letter changes (like s for z in UK vs US), but entire words e.g. pants instead of trousers.

This was notably positive (~20-25%).

Removing implied words from the title

We’ve seen mixed results from this. We ran a split test & found removing “online” from title tags had no effect on one particular client. Outside of our split-testing platform for a different client, we removed the word “online” from the title of an online store.

Our rankings for the terms including "online", dropped and we quickly put it back in.

More detail on the split tests

If you want to hear more detail about some of these tests, or just love video and you’re signed up to DistilledU, you can see Emily Potter's video on split testing from last year. If you’re not subscribed, you can see my slightly older talk here.

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

We usually see the impact of a title tag in 3-5 days.  We’ve had a couple which has taken longer, but this is the majority. The previous caveats are of course important here, we typically work on larger websites, which are heavily crawled.

Summary

I genuinely thought when I started I’d be able to get this post done in 1000 words. Even now, I can see all the little bits of context & other things that go into writing a good title, which I just couldn’t fit into this post. We didn’t even start talking about internal politics :)

But hopefully, this has got you on your way. Now let's hear some stories.

What title tag tests have you found effective? What’s the worst title tag you’ve ever tried?

[heavenwheel]

How to Write an Incredible Title Tag

The humble title tag. Probably the single most important 50-60 characters of that piece of content you’ve written. 

Perhaps you’ve found this post because you’ve spent hours pouring your soul into a piece of writing and now you’ve realised people will only read it if you write a good 50-60 characters. Or maybe it’s just that your boss told you that he needs quick wins for your product pages and so you’re turning in desperation to the ol’ title tag. Writing a good title tag is part art, part science.  How do you do it?

We’ll start with some quick basics for beginners. If you’re looking for the split test results, fun processes & all the more advanced things, scroll down two sections. Nothing to see here.

Contents

What is a title tag?

How long should a title tag be?

What do we want a title tag to do?

How to write a title tag for a single article

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

How much impact do title tag changes have?

7 learnings from title tag split tests

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

Summary

What is a title tag?

The title tag of a page is the HTML tag which is used to summarise the content of your webpage. It’ll be used by search engines as the title in search:

Yes, I’m using my own post as an example...

In your browser tab:

And even as a fallback in social sharing posts:

It isn’t the same thing as the on-page title! An on-page title could be written as a variation of your title tag, or something completely different. If we take a look at the article I’m using as an example we can see that the brand isn’t on the on-page title.

Title tag: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query | Distilled

On-page title: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query

If you want a more severe example take a look at this Redbull article.

How long should a title tag be?

A title tag should typically be 50-60 characters. Technically Google's maximum size is 600px. This usually works out at about 50-60 characters.

What do we want a title tag to do?

Welcome back, experienced people. What do we want our title tags to do?

Summarise our page: Our title should summarise the general thrust of our page. Google is going to use it to understand what our page is about.

Get people to click: It’s what users are going to see in the SERP. We need to convince people to pick us.

And if we just do one, you usually don’t get the best results. For example, using the title from the blog post above:

Totally factual: A Guide on Log Analysis.

All click: 6 Easy Steps to Log Analysis They Don’t Want You To Know.

We want to maximise how clicky our titles are without… you know… lying, mentioning that one trick dentists hate and crucially without compromising on summarising the page.

The title is primarily for people arriving on your site from Google. We’re not trying to pull people in who are idling. Those people are on Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram etc. (I know we did mention above that the title can sometimes be for social, but you can overwrite that if you’d like!)

The audience for your title is someone searching with an intent & that always comes first.

The process is quite different now depending on if you’re writing for a single article, or a template. 

How to write a title tag for a single article

Step 1 - Write the article

Write the article. It’s far easier to write a title when you know what you’ve written about. (This is assuming you know what you’re writing about, otherwise, sometimes headline writing can be a good way to generate ideas.)

Step 2 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the article

Pull out the primary purpose/point of the article. No clickiness yet, just the factual summary.

Example

Example post 1- A guide to log analysis

Example post 2: There is an industry backlash against Flybe’s government bailout

Step 3 - Find the factual, commonly searched keywords needed to describe the topic

Try to summarise what someone might search to find your article. Aim for the simplest most basic version of it. Search that term, take the top 5-10 articles which rank for it, plug them into a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge etc. and download all the keywords those articles rank for.

If the top 5-10 articles look nothing like yours either:

You’re first to a topic (unlikely, but possible)

Or your phrase is wrong, try again.

Once you’re happy with the phrase, take that big list of keywords and look for any other commonly occurring phrases you’re missing and take note.

Example

We’re going to continue using my old article on log analysis as an example. Because it doesn’t have a great title...

First search phrase pick: “log analysis” 

If we look up this keyword these are the top articles (only 3 shown below). Clearly we can see here that none of these articles are about search log analysis, I probably need to change my keyword:

Second search phrase pick: “seo log analysis”

Yep, that search result looks far better. We’ve still got a short phrase, but now the articles are now on topic with my own:

Excellent. Now:

Let’s take all the URLs that rank in the top 5-10.

Download the keywords they rank  for. (Ahrefs, SEMRush, Sistrix etc.)

And then get the most common keywords from that list. This ngrams tool is a nice way to do it. We get:

word frequency log 164 analysis 65 file 56 analyzer 41 server 40 logs 29 grep 13 analyze 13 access 12 excel 11

If we pull out the big generic words which would also apply to my article we get:

Log

Analysis

File

And possibly also:

Server

Step 4 - Writing lots of titles

Process

Now we’ve got all the factual words we’ll want in our title and brand.

What inspiration can we get for the clicky part? Lets quickly blast through a couple:

Writing an emotional headline:

Fear

Surprise

Anger

Disgust

Affirmation

Adding numbers:

Number of items in a list

Price

Date

Shameless clickbait inspiration:

Adding in mindblowing adverbs

The word “actually”

Being unreasonably specific

Then we try to write as many headlines as we can, but without trading away our relevance and factual keywords. 

When I started I worked with Hannah Smith on several projects. I remember her beating into us - “Write 20 titles. 20 is really hard.” Most of them will suck, but you’ll force yourself to be creative and somewhere there might be gold.

Example

Back to our previous example.

We’ve got our important factual words. We also know we want SEO as without that the intent of results shown wasn’t correct. Together those 4 words (without server) take up 18 characters. Which gives us roughly 32 characters left to play with. Let's also look at our current title and see what we’re working with:

A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with BigQuery | Distilled

Making it clicky 

Factual description 

Brand 

We can see I’ve used “Complete Guide” to try and make it clicky and that I’ve also put the method of analysis “BigQuery” into the title. Both of these we could definitely play around with. Now we just try to write as many titles as we can.

“A Guide to SEO Log File Analysis | Distilled”

“What is a log file and why is it helpful for SEO? | Distilled”

“6 Stage SEO Log File Analysis - A Complete Guide | Distilled”

“How to do an SEO log file analysis | Distilled”

“SEO Log File Analysis - The most important technical analysis | Distilled”

“5 Ways to Analyse Log Files for SEO You Didn’t Know | Distilled”

“Logging in the SEO jungles of the internet | Distilled”

“Log analysis is the technical audit you should be doing | Distilled”

“Stop wasting your time crawling and look at the logs | Distilled”

“Log analysis for SEO in 2020 | Distilled”

“Server Log Analysis Guide - SEO For Large Websites | Distilled”

I started with the restrictions and gradually just ignored them in my attempt to get to 20 titles. I didn’t get there. Sorry Hannah.

Step 5 - Picking one

How do we decide which is best? 

Honestly, it’s savagely hard to pick the right title by yourself. Of all the title tag tests we’ve run at Distilled, only one in five is typically positive. When I first started in search, I thought titles were the easy win. About a year and a half of running endless title tag split tests and I’m no longer convinced.

If you can test it. The two easiest ways for a single article are:

Paying for it: If you’ve got the budget, you could run paid social media campaigns and see which title performs best.

Friends & Colleagues: Make a poll for your friends & colleagues and get them to vote.

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

The above process works great if all you need to write is a single title.

But if you’ve got a template with hundreds of thousands of pages, then you can’t really do that. Well, you could, but it would be exhausting. Instead, we’re going to need a format for a title that we can apply to all our pages, to make our template shine. That previous process won’t cut it.

Step 1 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the page

We’re going to start by trying to summarise the attributes of the page in as much detail as possible. This will give us an idea of what pieces of detail we can pull into our titles across our template.

Example

I’ve pulled two page templates from rightmove.co.uk (this isn’t every page template but we’re keeping it simple):

Properties for sale - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Houses & flats

Number of properties: 3,940

Price range: £190,000 - £3.5 million

Numbers of property types:

269 detached

851 semi detached

690 terraced

Properties to rent - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Flats

Number of properties: 7,155

Price range: £75 - £34,667 per month

Numbers of property types:

238 detached

864 semi detached

1,770 terraced

Step 2 - Figure out what searches should return our template

Our templated page matches a specific intent. We need to figure out how to represent that in a title tag. 

Two things make this hard:

We might have multiple templates with similar intents.

The pages in our template may be similar.

We need to try and make a title which:

Differentiates our template from other templates.

Differentiates pages in our template from each other.

If we’re really struggling perhaps these pages shouldn’t even exist. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Example

We have two templates:

For sale

To rent

In this case, it’s pretty simple. For sale & to rent are clearly the important keywords we need to keep each template different. We can see that by looking at the SERPs. Changing those keywords, changes the results from for sale to rent.

Within our template, we have lots of different locations.

Properties for sale in Manchester

Properties for sale in Ipswich

 In order to keep the pages in our template different, we’re going to need the location in the title.

Step 3 - Accept that it’s messy

But anytime you work with titles it’s going to get messy.

Take our previous example. Rightmove actually has pages for Manchester & Greater Manchester. One ranks for properties and the other for flats. Something is clearly going on there. Uh oh.

Should that change what we do?

When we’re working at scale, patterns are going to breakdown. There hopefully is an underlying pattern, but look long enough and you’ll find exceptions. All we can do is do our best. Make a reasonable guess at what is going on and spoiler for stage 6. Test.

Step 4 - Are there any common phrases we’re missing?

This is exactly the same as step 3 for articles. 

Take your phrase which summarises the page.

Search for it. Download all the keywords the top 5-10 results rank for.

Find the most common words.

Example

To keep it brief, we’re going to just stick with the properties for sale template for the rest of these steps! Running this example with the top phrases for “properties for sale in manchester” we get:

Keyword Frequency manchester 211 sale 122 for 107 for sale 96 houses 59 house 45 buy 42 sale manchester 40 houses for 36 property 32

Words to note here are all fairly self-explanatory:

Property

Houses

Buy

Step 5 - What can we add to make it more attractive?

We know what we need to include to make the intent of our page clear.

Property/houses

For sale/To rent

Location

Now let's use that as a base and write as many titles as possible.  

We want to:

Make them as clicky as possible.

Use extra attributes.

Get creative.

Avoid using words which might change search intent.

A general difference between this and individual articles: If you end up with an entirely factual template title that is far more acceptable here than with an individual article.

Generic ideas for things you can put in titles

Adding prices into the title.

Adding some sort of quantity into the title. 

Adding year into the title. 

Put in the obvious e.g. “online” in an online shop.

Popular synonyms.

Words to watch out for that can change an intent

Comparison style words - best, compare etc. 

Deal seeking words: cheapest, cheap, deal, affordable

Example

Let’s have a go at writing titles for our category pages

Our base is:

Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Let’s make variants:

Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,000+ Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Properties for Sale - Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale Across Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses for Sale in Manchester - Get there first | Rightmove

3,940 Properties for Sale in Manchester - Find your Happy | Rightmove

That’s a lot of variations. We even managed to fit in their tag line at the end.

Step 5 - Pick a title

Process

Just like with articles we’re going to end up with a list of titles and unsure which one will be best. Far more than with individual title tags, it’s really really important to split test.

Template level title tags are messy. We’ve already seen that in our example. You can make educated guesses from performing some large scale analysis, but there are going to be effects you miss. 

What works on one site won’t work on another & we’ve found only 1 in 5 title tags ends up being positive.

The stakes are often higher. We’re not changing one page, we’re changing a group of pages which is often a non-trivial amount of your search traffic.

If you can test at all I’d highly recommend it. We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started. The two most useful should be:

What is SEO split testing 

DIY SEO split testing tool

If you can’t test, you can at least lean on our tests, I’ve got results from those in the next section.

Important context for our title tag split tests

We’re lucky enough at Distilled to have access to SEO split testing software we built. It lets us test different titles & accurately measure the impact on organic traffic. We’re about to talk about the different results we’ve learned, so it’s important to briefly talk about the assumptions implicit in these results.

You can only run SEO split tests on large groups of similar pages (e.g. all category pages, all listing pages etc.) and that means our results are from certain types of websites:

The websites are mostly large and authoritative. 

They tend to be in competitive SERPs.

The companies usually have SEO teams who have done the basics. There usually isn’t anything glaringly awful like product pages without titles that we can fix.

They are more typically tests applied to template pages like category, product & listing pages rather than blog pages. (Although that’s not everything, we run split tests on the Moz blog for example!)

I think you can learn a huge amount from these tests, but it’s still important to bear those assumptions in mind.

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

Writing titles is really hard. We mentioned this above, but let's look at our numbers in slightly more detail. We’ve run many title tag tests across different industries. Our results break down as follows:

Successes: 22%

Null: 38%

Failures: 40%

Oof. 78% of the time title tag tests fall flat or actually harm the website. That makes testing super important. It’s not impossible you could work on a website where you never have a positive title tag test. Nothing you try will ever work. Without testing, you’d probably still roll out those titles. Just spotting the failures and not rolling them out will save you a huge amount of traffic.

With a single article, this isn’t so worrying, you’ve got a far larger creative space to play in and if it does go wrong, it’s a far smaller proportion of your traffic.

If you’re changing titles on big page templates, please make sure you test them!

How much impact do title tag changes have?

Broadly most title tag tests have an impact between 4-15% in either direction.

You can see a distribution of our title tag tests below.

7 learnings from title tag split tests

Most title tag changes are unique to a website, changing words and phrases which don't generalise well from website to website. However, there are some more common patterns we’ve been able to test.

Putting in prices

50% of our title tag tests involving adding the price into the title have been positive. Not only do we get to put a number into the title, but it also provides more information.

Why was it null or negative the rest of the time? 

Our consultant Emily Potter thinks this is down to whether or not Google can find the price you put in the title on the rest of your page - i.e. are you being honest about price. We also think it may make a difference depending on how competitive you are on price.

Putting in year numbers

We haven’t had the chance to test this a huge number of times, but so far this change has been positive in the niches where we’ve done it. The shameless putting 2019, 2020 in the title has helped.

Shortening title tags hasn’t actually been that helpful

When you have lots of automatically generated titles, it’s common to end up with titles that are too long.

We’ve run a number of tests about shortening these titles and nearly all of them have been null (~80%). They’ve also never been positive. Our best current theory is that the templates which often end up with long title tags are typically attracting long tail traffic. When they are truncated, they’re still the only relevant result and so continue to rank, perhaps for long tail queries, keyword stuffing isn’t a problem.

Having said that I’d still say it’s worth trying to shorten your titles. If you manage to cut 4-5 characters from your title with no effect, you could use that space to add price or something else which may have an effect.

Emojis didn’t work

We’ve run several tests to put emojis into title tags and so far it hasn’t helped. Sorry folks :(

I mean c’mon. Marketers can barely be trusted with FAQ schema, can you imagine what we’d do to Emojis.

Eye-grabbing on category/listing pages

We’ve tried some title tags for category/listing pages which were very different, actively calling out to the user in the SERPs.

Standard: Ford for Sale | CarShop

Example of our type of test: You there! Fords for Sale at the CarShop

These did not work. 

Localising language

We tested using localised versions of phrases. This wasn’t single letter changes (like s for z in UK vs US), but entire words e.g. pants instead of trousers.

This was notably positive (~20-25%).

Removing implied words from the title

We’ve seen mixed results from this. We ran a split test & found removing “online” from title tags had no effect on one particular client. Outside of our split-testing platform for a different client, we removed the word “online” from the title of an online store.

Our rankings for the terms including "online", dropped and we quickly put it back in.

More detail on the split tests

If you want to hear more detail about some of these tests, or just love video and you’re signed up to DistilledU, you can see Emily Potter's video on split testing from last year. If you’re not subscribed, you can see my slightly older talk here.

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

We usually see the impact of a title tag in 3-5 days.  We’ve had a couple which has taken longer, but this is the majority. The previous caveats are of course important here, we typically work on larger websites, which are heavily crawled.

Summary

I genuinely thought when I started I’d be able to get this post done in 1000 words. Even now, I can see all the little bits of context & other things that go into writing a good title, which I just couldn’t fit into this post. We didn’t even start talking about internal politics :)

But hopefully, this has got you on your way. Now let's hear some stories.

What title tag tests have you found effective? What’s the worst title tag you’ve ever tried?

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-write-an-incredible-title-tag/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[donnafmae]

How to Write an Incredible Title Tag

The humble title tag. Probably the single most important 50-60 characters of that piece of content you’ve written. 

Perhaps you’ve found this post because you’ve spent hours pouring your soul into a piece of writing and now you’ve realised people will only read it if you write a good 50-60 characters. Or maybe it’s just that your boss told you that he needs quick wins for your product pages and so you’re turning in desperation to the ol’ title tag. Writing a good title tag is part art, part science.  How do you do it?

We’ll start with some quick basics for beginners. If you’re looking for the split test results, fun processes & all the more advanced things, scroll down two sections. Nothing to see here.

Contents

What is a title tag?

How long should a title tag be?

What do we want a title tag to do?

How to write a title tag for a single article

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

How much impact do title tag changes have?

7 learnings from title tag split tests

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

Summary

What is a title tag?

The title tag of a page is the HTML tag which is used to summarise the content of your webpage. It’ll be used by search engines as the title in search:

Yes, I’m using my own post as an example...

In your browser tab:

And even as a fallback in social sharing posts:

It isn’t the same thing as the on-page title! An on-page title could be written as a variation of your title tag, or something completely different. If we take a look at the article I’m using as an example we can see that the brand isn’t on the on-page title.

Title tag: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query | Distilled

On-page title: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query

If you want a more severe example take a look at this Redbull article.

How long should a title tag be?

A title tag should typically be 50-60 characters. Technically Google's maximum size is 600px. This usually works out at about 50-60 characters.

What do we want a title tag to do?

Welcome back, experienced people. What do we want our title tags to do?

Summarise our page: Our title should summarise the general thrust of our page. Google is going to use it to understand what our page is about.

Get people to click: It’s what users are going to see in the SERP. We need to convince people to pick us.

And if we just do one, you usually don’t get the best results. For example, using the title from the blog post above:

Totally factual: A Guide on Log Analysis.

All click: 6 Easy Steps to Log Analysis They Don’t Want You To Know.

We want to maximise how clicky our titles are without… you know… lying, mentioning that one trick dentists hate and crucially without compromising on summarising the page.

The title is primarily for people arriving on your site from Google. We’re not trying to pull people in who are idling. Those people are on Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram etc. (I know we did mention above that the title can sometimes be for social, but you can overwrite that if you’d like!)

The audience for your title is someone searching with an intent & that always comes first.

The process is quite different now depending on if you’re writing for a single article, or a template. 

How to write a title tag for a single article

Step 1 - Write the article

Write the article. It’s far easier to write a title when you know what you’ve written about. (This is assuming you know what you’re writing about, otherwise, sometimes headline writing can be a good way to generate ideas.)

Step 2 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the article

Pull out the primary purpose/point of the article. No clickiness yet, just the factual summary.

Example

Example post 1- A guide to log analysis

Example post 2: There is an industry backlash against Flybe’s government bailout

Step 3 - Find the factual, commonly searched keywords needed to describe the topic

Try to summarise what someone might search to find your article. Aim for the simplest most basic version of it. Search that term, take the top 5-10 articles which rank for it, plug them into a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge etc. and download all the keywords those articles rank for.

If the top 5-10 articles look nothing like yours either:

You’re first to a topic (unlikely, but possible)

Or your phrase is wrong, try again.

Once you’re happy with the phrase, take that big list of keywords and look for any other commonly occurring phrases you’re missing and take note.

Example

We’re going to continue using my old article on log analysis as an example. Because it doesn’t have a great title...

First search phrase pick: “log analysis” 

If we look up this keyword these are the top articles (only 3 shown below). Clearly we can see here that none of these articles are about search log analysis, I probably need to change my keyword:

Second search phrase pick: “seo log analysis”

Yep, that search result looks far better. We’ve still got a short phrase, but now the articles are now on topic with my own:

Excellent. Now:

Let’s take all the URLs that rank in the top 5-10.

Download the keywords they rank  for. (Ahrefs, SEMRush, Sistrix etc.)

And then get the most common keywords from that list. This ngrams tool is a nice way to do it. We get:

word frequency log 164 analysis 65 file 56 analyzer 41 server 40 logs 29 grep 13 analyze 13 access 12 excel 11

If we pull out the big generic words which would also apply to my article we get:

Log

Analysis

File

And possibly also:

Server

Step 4 - Writing lots of titles

Process

Now we’ve got all the factual words we’ll want in our title and brand.

What inspiration can we get for the clicky part? Lets quickly blast through a couple:

Writing an emotional headline:

Fear

Surprise

Anger

Disgust

Affirmation

Adding numbers:

Number of items in a list

Price

Date

Shameless clickbait inspiration:

Adding in mindblowing adverbs

The word “actually”

Being unreasonably specific

Then we try to write as many headlines as we can, but without trading away our relevance and factual keywords. 

When I started I worked with Hannah Smith on several projects. I remember her beating into us - “Write 20 titles. 20 is really hard.” Most of them will suck, but you’ll force yourself to be creative and somewhere there might be gold.

Example

Back to our previous example.

We’ve got our important factual words. We also know we want SEO as without that the intent of results shown wasn’t correct. Together those 4 words (without server) take up 18 characters. Which gives us roughly 32 characters left to play with. Let's also look at our current title and see what we’re working with:

A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with BigQuery | Distilled

Making it clicky 

Factual description 

Brand 

We can see I’ve used “Complete Guide” to try and make it clicky and that I’ve also put the method of analysis “BigQuery” into the title. Both of these we could definitely play around with. Now we just try to write as many titles as we can.

“A Guide to SEO Log File Analysis | Distilled”

“What is a log file and why is it helpful for SEO? | Distilled”

“6 Stage SEO Log File Analysis - A Complete Guide | Distilled”

“How to do an SEO log file analysis | Distilled”

“SEO Log File Analysis - The most important technical analysis | Distilled”

“5 Ways to Analyse Log Files for SEO You Didn’t Know | Distilled”

“Logging in the SEO jungles of the internet | Distilled”

“Log analysis is the technical audit you should be doing | Distilled”

“Stop wasting your time crawling and look at the logs | Distilled”

“Log analysis for SEO in 2020 | Distilled”

“Server Log Analysis Guide - SEO For Large Websites | Distilled”

I started with the restrictions and gradually just ignored them in my attempt to get to 20 titles. I didn’t get there. Sorry Hannah.

Step 5 - Picking one

How do we decide which is best? 

Honestly, it’s savagely hard to pick the right title by yourself. Of all the title tag tests we’ve run at Distilled, only one in five is typically positive. When I first started in search, I thought titles were the easy win. About a year and a half of running endless title tag split tests and I’m no longer convinced.

If you can test it. The two easiest ways for a single article are:

Paying for it: If you’ve got the budget, you could run paid social media campaigns and see which title performs best.

Friends & Colleagues: Make a poll for your friends & colleagues and get them to vote.

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

The above process works great if all you need to write is a single title.

But if you’ve got a template with hundreds of thousands of pages, then you can’t really do that. Well, you could, but it would be exhausting. Instead, we’re going to need a format for a title that we can apply to all our pages, to make our template shine. That previous process won’t cut it.

Step 1 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the page

We’re going to start by trying to summarise the attributes of the page in as much detail as possible. This will give us an idea of what pieces of detail we can pull into our titles across our template.

Example

I’ve pulled two page templates from rightmove.co.uk (this isn’t every page template but we’re keeping it simple):

Properties for sale - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Houses & flats

Number of properties: 3,940

Price range: £190,000 - £3.5 million

Numbers of property types:

269 detached

851 semi detached

690 terraced

Properties to rent - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Flats

Number of properties: 7,155

Price range: £75 - £34,667 per month

Numbers of property types:

238 detached

864 semi detached

1,770 terraced

Step 2 - Figure out what searches should return our template

Our templated page matches a specific intent. We need to figure out how to represent that in a title tag. 

Two things make this hard:

We might have multiple templates with similar intents.

The pages in our template may be similar.

We need to try and make a title which:

Differentiates our template from other templates.

Differentiates pages in our template from each other.

If we’re really struggling perhaps these pages shouldn’t even exist. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Example

We have two templates:

For sale

To rent

In this case, it’s pretty simple. For sale & to rent are clearly the important keywords we need to keep each template different. We can see that by looking at the SERPs. Changing those keywords, changes the results from for sale to rent.

Within our template, we have lots of different locations.

Properties for sale in Manchester

Properties for sale in Ipswich

 In order to keep the pages in our template different, we’re going to need the location in the title.

Step 3 - Accept that it’s messy

But anytime you work with titles it’s going to get messy.

Take our previous example. Rightmove actually has pages for Manchester & Greater Manchester. One ranks for properties and the other for flats. Something is clearly going on there. Uh oh.

Should that change what we do?

When we’re working at scale, patterns are going to breakdown. There hopefully is an underlying pattern, but look long enough and you’ll find exceptions. All we can do is do our best. Make a reasonable guess at what is going on and spoiler for stage 6. Test.

Step 4 - Are there any common phrases we’re missing?

This is exactly the same as step 3 for articles. 

Take your phrase which summarises the page.

Search for it. Download all the keywords the top 5-10 results rank for.

Find the most common words.

Example

To keep it brief, we’re going to just stick with the properties for sale template for the rest of these steps! Running this example with the top phrases for “properties for sale in manchester” we get:

Keyword Frequency manchester 211 sale 122 for 107 for sale 96 houses 59 house 45 buy 42 sale manchester 40 houses for 36 property 32

Words to note here are all fairly self-explanatory:

Property

Houses

Buy

Step 5 - What can we add to make it more attractive?

We know what we need to include to make the intent of our page clear.

Property/houses

For sale/To rent

Location

Now let's use that as a base and write as many titles as possible.  

We want to:

Make them as clicky as possible.

Use extra attributes.

Get creative.

Avoid using words which might change search intent.

A general difference between this and individual articles: If you end up with an entirely factual template title that is far more acceptable here than with an individual article.

Generic ideas for things you can put in titles

Adding prices into the title.

Adding some sort of quantity into the title. 

Adding year into the title. 

Put in the obvious e.g. “online” in an online shop.

Popular synonyms.

Words to watch out for that can change an intent

Comparison style words - best, compare etc. 

Deal seeking words: cheapest, cheap, deal, affordable

Example

Let’s have a go at writing titles for our category pages

Our base is:

Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Let’s make variants:

Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,000+ Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Properties for Sale - Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale Across Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses for Sale in Manchester - Get there first | Rightmove

3,940 Properties for Sale in Manchester - Find your Happy | Rightmove

That’s a lot of variations. We even managed to fit in their tag line at the end.

Step 5 - Pick a title

Process

Just like with articles we’re going to end up with a list of titles and unsure which one will be best. Far more than with individual title tags, it’s really really important to split test.

Template level title tags are messy. We’ve already seen that in our example. You can make educated guesses from performing some large scale analysis, but there are going to be effects you miss. 

What works on one site won’t work on another & we’ve found only 1 in 5 title tags ends up being positive.

The stakes are often higher. We’re not changing one page, we’re changing a group of pages which is often a non-trivial amount of your search traffic.

If you can test at all I’d highly recommend it. We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started. The two most useful should be:

What is SEO split testing 

DIY SEO split testing tool

If you can’t test, you can at least lean on our tests, I’ve got results from those in the next section.

Important context for our title tag split tests

We’re lucky enough at Distilled to have access to SEO split testing software we built. It lets us test different titles & accurately measure the impact on organic traffic. We’re about to talk about the different results we’ve learned, so it’s important to briefly talk about the assumptions implicit in these results.

You can only run SEO split tests on large groups of similar pages (e.g. all category pages, all listing pages etc.) and that means our results are from certain types of websites:

The websites are mostly large and authoritative. 

They tend to be in competitive SERPs.

The companies usually have SEO teams who have done the basics. There usually isn’t anything glaringly awful like product pages without titles that we can fix.

They are more typically tests applied to template pages like category, product & listing pages rather than blog pages. (Although that’s not everything, we run split tests on the Moz blog for example!)

I think you can learn a huge amount from these tests, but it’s still important to bear those assumptions in mind.

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

Writing titles is really hard. We mentioned this above, but let's look at our numbers in slightly more detail. We’ve run many title tag tests across different industries. Our results break down as follows:

Successes: 22%

Null: 38%

Failures: 40%

Oof. 78% of the time title tag tests fall flat or actually harm the website. That makes testing super important. It’s not impossible you could work on a website where you never have a positive title tag test. Nothing you try will ever work. Without testing, you’d probably still roll out those titles. Just spotting the failures and not rolling them out will save you a huge amount of traffic.

With a single article, this isn’t so worrying, you’ve got a far larger creative space to play in and if it does go wrong, it’s a far smaller proportion of your traffic.

If you’re changing titles on big page templates, please make sure you test them!

How much impact do title tag changes have?

Broadly most title tag tests have an impact between 4-15% in either direction.

You can see a distribution of our title tag tests below.

7 learnings from title tag split tests

Most title tag changes are unique to a website, changing words and phrases which don't generalise well from website to website. However, there are some more common patterns we’ve been able to test.

Putting in prices

50% of our title tag tests involving adding the price into the title have been positive. Not only do we get to put a number into the title, but it also provides more information.

Why was it null or negative the rest of the time? 

Our consultant Emily Potter thinks this is down to whether or not Google can find the price you put in the title on the rest of your page - i.e. are you being honest about price. We also think it may make a difference depending on how competitive you are on price.

Putting in year numbers

We haven’t had the chance to test this a huge number of times, but so far this change has been positive in the niches where we’ve done it. The shameless putting 2019, 2020 in the title has helped.

Shortening title tags hasn’t actually been that helpful

When you have lots of automatically generated titles, it’s common to end up with titles that are too long.

We’ve run a number of tests about shortening these titles and nearly all of them have been null (~80%). They’ve also never been positive. Our best current theory is that the templates which often end up with long title tags are typically attracting long tail traffic. When they are truncated, they’re still the only relevant result and so continue to rank, perhaps for long tail queries, keyword stuffing isn’t a problem.

Having said that I’d still say it’s worth trying to shorten your titles. If you manage to cut 4-5 characters from your title with no effect, you could use that space to add price or something else which may have an effect.

Emojis didn’t work

We’ve run several tests to put emojis into title tags and so far it hasn’t helped. Sorry folks :(

I mean c’mon. Marketers can barely be trusted with FAQ schema, can you imagine what we’d do to Emojis.

Eye-grabbing on category/listing pages

We’ve tried some title tags for category/listing pages which were very different, actively calling out to the user in the SERPs.

Standard: Ford for Sale | CarShop

Example of our type of test: You there! Fords for Sale at the CarShop

These did not work. 

Localising language

We tested using localised versions of phrases. This wasn’t single letter changes (like s for z in UK vs US), but entire words e.g. pants instead of trousers.

This was notably positive (~20-25%).

Removing implied words from the title

We’ve seen mixed results from this. We ran a split test & found removing “online” from title tags had no effect on one particular client. Outside of our split-testing platform for a different client, we removed the word “online” from the title of an online store.

Our rankings for the terms including "online", dropped and we quickly put it back in.

More detail on the split tests

If you want to hear more detail about some of these tests, or just love video and you’re signed up to DistilledU, you can see Emily Potter's video on split testing from last year. If you’re not subscribed, you can see my slightly older talk here.

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

We usually see the impact of a title tag in 3-5 days.  We’ve had a couple which has taken longer, but this is the majority. The previous caveats are of course important here, we typically work on larger websites, which are heavily crawled.

Summary

I genuinely thought when I started I’d be able to get this post done in 1000 words. Even now, I can see all the little bits of context & other things that go into writing a good title, which I just couldn’t fit into this post. We didn’t even start talking about internal politics :)

But hopefully, this has got you on your way. Now let's hear some stories.

What title tag tests have you found effective? What’s the worst title tag you’ve ever tried?

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-write-an-incredible-title-tag/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[anthonykrierion]

How to Write an Incredible Title Tag

The humble title tag. Probably the single most important 50-60 characters of that piece of content you’ve written. 

Perhaps you’ve found this post because you’ve spent hours pouring your soul into a piece of writing and now you’ve realised people will only read it if you write a good 50-60 characters. Or maybe it’s just that your boss told you that he needs quick wins for your product pages and so you’re turning in desperation to the ol’ title tag. Writing a good title tag is part art, part science.  How do you do it?

We’ll start with some quick basics for beginners. If you’re looking for the split test results, fun processes & all the more advanced things, scroll down two sections. Nothing to see here.

Contents

What is a title tag?

How long should a title tag be?

What do we want a title tag to do?

How to write a title tag for a single article

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

How much impact do title tag changes have?

7 learnings from title tag split tests

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

Summary

What is a title tag?

The title tag of a page is the HTML tag which is used to summarise the content of your webpage. It’ll be used by search engines as the title in search:

Yes, I’m using my own post as an example...

In your browser tab:

And even as a fallback in social sharing posts:

It isn’t the same thing as the on-page title! An on-page title could be written as a variation of your title tag, or something completely different. If we take a look at the article I’m using as an example we can see that the brand isn’t on the on-page title.

Title tag: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query | Distilled

On-page title: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with Big Query

If you want a more severe example take a look at this Redbull article.

How long should a title tag be?

A title tag should typically be 50-60 characters. Technically Google's maximum size is 600px. This usually works out at about 50-60 characters.

What do we want a title tag to do?

Welcome back, experienced people. What do we want our title tags to do?

Summarise our page: Our title should summarise the general thrust of our page. Google is going to use it to understand what our page is about.

Get people to click: It’s what users are going to see in the SERP. We need to convince people to pick us.

And if we just do one, you usually don’t get the best results. For example, using the title from the blog post above:

Totally factual: A Guide on Log Analysis.

All click: 6 Easy Steps to Log Analysis They Don’t Want You To Know.

We want to maximise how clicky our titles are without… you know… lying, mentioning that one trick dentists hate and crucially without compromising on summarising the page.

The title is primarily for people arriving on your site from Google. We’re not trying to pull people in who are idling. Those people are on Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram etc. (I know we did mention above that the title can sometimes be for social, but you can overwrite that if you’d like!)

The audience for your title is someone searching with an intent & that always comes first.

The process is quite different now depending on if you’re writing for a single article, or a template. 

How to write a title tag for a single article

Step 1 - Write the article

Write the article. It’s far easier to write a title when you know what you’ve written about. (This is assuming you know what you’re writing about, otherwise, sometimes headline writing can be a good way to generate ideas.)

Step 2 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the article

Pull out the primary purpose/point of the article. No clickiness yet, just the factual summary.

Example

Example post 1- A guide to log analysis

Example post 2: There is an industry backlash against Flybe’s government bailout

Step 3 - Find the factual, commonly searched keywords needed to describe the topic

Try to summarise what someone might search to find your article. Aim for the simplest most basic version of it. Search that term, take the top 5-10 articles which rank for it, plug them into a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge etc. and download all the keywords those articles rank for.

If the top 5-10 articles look nothing like yours either:

You’re first to a topic (unlikely, but possible)

Or your phrase is wrong, try again.

Once you’re happy with the phrase, take that big list of keywords and look for any other commonly occurring phrases you’re missing and take note.

Example

We’re going to continue using my old article on log analysis as an example. Because it doesn’t have a great title...

First search phrase pick: “log analysis” 

If we look up this keyword these are the top articles (only 3 shown below). Clearly we can see here that none of these articles are about search log analysis, I probably need to change my keyword:

Second search phrase pick: “seo log analysis”

Yep, that search result looks far better. We’ve still got a short phrase, but now the articles are now on topic with my own:

Excellent. Now:

Let’s take all the URLs that rank in the top 5-10.

Download the keywords they rank  for. (Ahrefs, SEMRush, Sistrix etc.)

And then get the most common keywords from that list. This ngrams tool is a nice way to do it. We get:

word frequency log 164 analysis 65 file 56 analyzer 41 server 40 logs 29 grep 13 analyze 13 access 12 excel 11

If we pull out the big generic words which would also apply to my article we get:

Log

Analysis

File

And possibly also:

Server

Step 4 - Writing lots of titles

Process

Now we’ve got all the factual words we’ll want in our title and brand.

What inspiration can we get for the clicky part? Lets quickly blast through a couple:

Writing an emotional headline:

Fear

Surprise

Anger

Disgust

Affirmation

Adding numbers:

Number of items in a list

Price

Date

Shameless clickbait inspiration:

Adding in mindblowing adverbs

The word “actually”

Being unreasonably specific

Then we try to write as many headlines as we can, but without trading away our relevance and factual keywords. 

When I started I worked with Hannah Smith on several projects. I remember her beating into us - “Write 20 titles. 20 is really hard.” Most of them will suck, but you’ll force yourself to be creative and somewhere there might be gold.

Example

Back to our previous example.

We’ve got our important factual words. We also know we want SEO as without that the intent of results shown wasn’t correct. Together those 4 words (without server) take up 18 characters. Which gives us roughly 32 characters left to play with. Let's also look at our current title and see what we’re working with:

A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with BigQuery | Distilled

Making it clicky 

Factual description 

Brand 

We can see I’ve used “Complete Guide” to try and make it clicky and that I’ve also put the method of analysis “BigQuery” into the title. Both of these we could definitely play around with. Now we just try to write as many titles as we can.

“A Guide to SEO Log File Analysis | Distilled”

“What is a log file and why is it helpful for SEO? | Distilled”

“6 Stage SEO Log File Analysis - A Complete Guide | Distilled”

“How to do an SEO log file analysis | Distilled”

“SEO Log File Analysis - The most important technical analysis | Distilled”

“5 Ways to Analyse Log Files for SEO You Didn’t Know | Distilled”

“Logging in the SEO jungles of the internet | Distilled”

“Log analysis is the technical audit you should be doing | Distilled”

“Stop wasting your time crawling and look at the logs | Distilled”

“Log analysis for SEO in 2020 | Distilled”

“Server Log Analysis Guide - SEO For Large Websites | Distilled”

I started with the restrictions and gradually just ignored them in my attempt to get to 20 titles. I didn’t get there. Sorry Hannah.

Step 5 - Picking one

How do we decide which is best? 

Honestly, it’s savagely hard to pick the right title by yourself. Of all the title tag tests we’ve run at Distilled, only one in five is typically positive. When I first started in search, I thought titles were the easy win. About a year and a half of running endless title tag split tests and I’m no longer convinced.

If you can test it. The two easiest ways for a single article are:

Paying for it: If you’ve got the budget, you could run paid social media campaigns and see which title performs best.

Friends & Colleagues: Make a poll for your friends & colleagues and get them to vote.

How to write hundreds of title tags for a template

The above process works great if all you need to write is a single title.

But if you’ve got a template with hundreds of thousands of pages, then you can’t really do that. Well, you could, but it would be exhausting. Instead, we’re going to need a format for a title that we can apply to all our pages, to make our template shine. That previous process won’t cut it.

Step 1 - Summarise the primary purpose/point of the page

We’re going to start by trying to summarise the attributes of the page in as much detail as possible. This will give us an idea of what pieces of detail we can pull into our titles across our template.

Example

I’ve pulled two page templates from rightmove.co.uk (this isn’t every page template but we’re keeping it simple):

Properties for sale - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Houses & flats

Number of properties: 3,940

Price range: £190,000 - £3.5 million

Numbers of property types:

269 detached

851 semi detached

690 terraced

Properties to rent - Page: 

URL: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/Manchester.html

Location: Manchester

Properties types: Flats

Number of properties: 7,155

Price range: £75 - £34,667 per month

Numbers of property types:

238 detached

864 semi detached

1,770 terraced

Step 2 - Figure out what searches should return our template

Our templated page matches a specific intent. We need to figure out how to represent that in a title tag. 

Two things make this hard:

We might have multiple templates with similar intents.

The pages in our template may be similar.

We need to try and make a title which:

Differentiates our template from other templates.

Differentiates pages in our template from each other.

If we’re really struggling perhaps these pages shouldn’t even exist. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Example

We have two templates:

For sale

To rent

In this case, it’s pretty simple. For sale & to rent are clearly the important keywords we need to keep each template different. We can see that by looking at the SERPs. Changing those keywords, changes the results from for sale to rent.

Within our template, we have lots of different locations.

Properties for sale in Manchester

Properties for sale in Ipswich

 In order to keep the pages in our template different, we’re going to need the location in the title.

Step 3 - Accept that it’s messy

But anytime you work with titles it’s going to get messy.

Take our previous example. Rightmove actually has pages for Manchester & Greater Manchester. One ranks for properties and the other for flats. Something is clearly going on there. Uh oh.

Should that change what we do?

When we’re working at scale, patterns are going to breakdown. There hopefully is an underlying pattern, but look long enough and you’ll find exceptions. All we can do is do our best. Make a reasonable guess at what is going on and spoiler for stage 6. Test.

Step 4 - Are there any common phrases we’re missing?

This is exactly the same as step 3 for articles. 

Take your phrase which summarises the page.

Search for it. Download all the keywords the top 5-10 results rank for.

Find the most common words.

Example

To keep it brief, we’re going to just stick with the properties for sale template for the rest of these steps! Running this example with the top phrases for “properties for sale in manchester” we get:

Keyword Frequency manchester 211 sale 122 for 107 for sale 96 houses 59 house 45 buy 42 sale manchester 40 houses for 36 property 32

Words to note here are all fairly self-explanatory:

Property

Houses

Buy

Step 5 - What can we add to make it more attractive?

We know what we need to include to make the intent of our page clear.

Property/houses

For sale/To rent

Location

Now let's use that as a base and write as many titles as possible.  

We want to:

Make them as clicky as possible.

Use extra attributes.

Get creative.

Avoid using words which might change search intent.

A general difference between this and individual articles: If you end up with an entirely factual template title that is far more acceptable here than with an individual article.

Generic ideas for things you can put in titles

Adding prices into the title.

Adding some sort of quantity into the title. 

Adding year into the title. 

Put in the obvious e.g. “online” in an online shop.

Popular synonyms.

Words to watch out for that can change an intent

Comparison style words - best, compare etc. 

Deal seeking words: cheapest, cheap, deal, affordable

Example

Let’s have a go at writing titles for our category pages

Our base is:

Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Let’s make variants:

Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Properties & Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Buy Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,000+ Houses & Properties for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

Properties for Sale - Houses for Sale in Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses & Properties for Sale Across Manchester | Rightmove

3,940 Houses for Sale in Manchester - Get there first | Rightmove

3,940 Properties for Sale in Manchester - Find your Happy | Rightmove

That’s a lot of variations. We even managed to fit in their tag line at the end.

Step 5 - Pick a title

Process

Just like with articles we’re going to end up with a list of titles and unsure which one will be best. Far more than with individual title tags, it’s really really important to split test.

Template level title tags are messy. We’ve already seen that in our example. You can make educated guesses from performing some large scale analysis, but there are going to be effects you miss. 

What works on one site won’t work on another & we’ve found only 1 in 5 title tags ends up being positive.

The stakes are often higher. We’re not changing one page, we’re changing a group of pages which is often a non-trivial amount of your search traffic.

If you can test at all I’d highly recommend it. We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started. The two most useful should be:

What is SEO split testing 

DIY SEO split testing tool

If you can’t test, you can at least lean on our tests, I’ve got results from those in the next section.

Important context for our title tag split tests

We’re lucky enough at Distilled to have access to SEO split testing software we built. It lets us test different titles & accurately measure the impact on organic traffic. We’re about to talk about the different results we’ve learned, so it’s important to briefly talk about the assumptions implicit in these results.

You can only run SEO split tests on large groups of similar pages (e.g. all category pages, all listing pages etc.) and that means our results are from certain types of websites:

The websites are mostly large and authoritative. 

They tend to be in competitive SERPs.

The companies usually have SEO teams who have done the basics. There usually isn’t anything glaringly awful like product pages without titles that we can fix.

They are more typically tests applied to template pages like category, product & listing pages rather than blog pages. (Although that’s not everything, we run split tests on the Moz blog for example!)

I think you can learn a huge amount from these tests, but it’s still important to bear those assumptions in mind.

What are the chances you write a good title tag?

Writing titles is really hard. We mentioned this above, but let's look at our numbers in slightly more detail. We’ve run many title tag tests across different industries. Our results break down as follows:

Successes: 22%

Null: 38%

Failures: 40%

Oof. 78% of the time title tag tests fall flat or actually harm the website. That makes testing super important. It’s not impossible you could work on a website where you never have a positive title tag test. Nothing you try will ever work. Without testing, you’d probably still roll out those titles. Just spotting the failures and not rolling them out will save you a huge amount of traffic.

With a single article, this isn’t so worrying, you’ve got a far larger creative space to play in and if it does go wrong, it’s a far smaller proportion of your traffic.

If you’re changing titles on big page templates, please make sure you test them!

How much impact do title tag changes have?

Broadly most title tag tests have an impact between 4-15% in either direction.

You can see a distribution of our title tag tests below.

7 learnings from title tag split tests

Most title tag changes are unique to a website, changing words and phrases which don't generalise well from website to website. However, there are some more common patterns we’ve been able to test.

Putting in prices

50% of our title tag tests involving adding the price into the title have been positive. Not only do we get to put a number into the title, but it also provides more information.

Why was it null or negative the rest of the time? 

Our consultant Emily Potter thinks this is down to whether or not Google can find the price you put in the title on the rest of your page - i.e. are you being honest about price. We also think it may make a difference depending on how competitive you are on price.

Putting in year numbers

We haven’t had the chance to test this a huge number of times, but so far this change has been positive in the niches where we’ve done it. The shameless putting 2019, 2020 in the title has helped.

Shortening title tags hasn’t actually been that helpful

When you have lots of automatically generated titles, it’s common to end up with titles that are too long.

We’ve run a number of tests about shortening these titles and nearly all of them have been null (~80%). They’ve also never been positive. Our best current theory is that the templates which often end up with long title tags are typically attracting long tail traffic. When they are truncated, they’re still the only relevant result and so continue to rank, perhaps for long tail queries, keyword stuffing isn’t a problem.

Having said that I’d still say it’s worth trying to shorten your titles. If you manage to cut 4-5 characters from your title with no effect, you could use that space to add price or something else which may have an effect.

Emojis didn’t work

We’ve run several tests to put emojis into title tags and so far it hasn’t helped. Sorry folks :(

I mean c’mon. Marketers can barely be trusted with FAQ schema, can you imagine what we’d do to Emojis.

Eye-grabbing on category/listing pages

We’ve tried some title tags for category/listing pages which were very different, actively calling out to the user in the SERPs.

Standard: Ford for Sale | CarShop

Example of our type of test: You there! Fords for Sale at the CarShop

These did not work. 

Localising language

We tested using localised versions of phrases. This wasn’t single letter changes (like s for z in UK vs US), but entire words e.g. pants instead of trousers.

This was notably positive (~20-25%).

Removing implied words from the title

We’ve seen mixed results from this. We ran a split test & found removing “online” from title tags had no effect on one particular client. Outside of our split-testing platform for a different client, we removed the word “online” from the title of an online store.

Our rankings for the terms including "online", dropped and we quickly put it back in.

More detail on the split tests

If you want to hear more detail about some of these tests, or just love video and you’re signed up to DistilledU, you can see Emily Potter's video on split testing from last year. If you’re not subscribed, you can see my slightly older talk here.

How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?

We usually see the impact of a title tag in 3-5 days.  We’ve had a couple which has taken longer, but this is the majority. The previous caveats are of course important here, we typically work on larger websites, which are heavily crawled.

Summary

I genuinely thought when I started I’d be able to get this post done in 1000 words. Even now, I can see all the little bits of context & other things that go into writing a good title, which I just couldn’t fit into this post. We didn’t even start talking about internal politics :)

But hopefully, this has got you on your way. Now let's hear some stories.

What title tag tests have you found effective? What’s the worst title tag you’ve ever tried?

How to Write an Incredible Title Tag was originally posted by Video And Blog Marketing

[insufferablemonsters]

that feeling when you go to mass post editor and you're like 'yeah i'll edit all my tags and do new ones' and then you see how many posts you have and you end up being like ... yeah fuck that nvm lol