Balancing Marketing and Writer's Creativity

Best way to go?

[hannamyluv]

I wasn't sure if this belonged here or in the general SEO forum. Mods please move if deemed incorrect.

Anyway, I am writing a content management system for someone I am working with who knows very little about internet marketing and nothing about SEO.

But, part of the reason I wanted to work with him is that he has a really fun writing voice, which I think most people would like. I don't want to stifle that voice on the site but his idea of a good title, may not be the best one from a SERPs standpoint.

For example, his choice might be:

"You don't know squat about widgets"

Which is fine for the on-page, but from my marketer's standpoint, I might want:

"Finding the best widget for your money" to show up in the SERPs.

Anyone out there have any experience with what the best wording is for informational content page titles? Not necessarily the title of the work, but what the page should display in the results to get people to click on it to read the content within?

[Marketing Guy]

No hard research done but I have received praise (and links!) from large academic sites for using a no-nonsense approach.

You could use the more SERP friendly title as part of the description?

[abbeyvet]

I have had this exact issue! My way around it was to allow for the entry of two 'titles'. One is the one the writer would naturally use, the other a more 'serious' one.

On the page, the writer's one appears between H1 tags, with, below it, the line "<insert serious title>", between H2 tags. It acts as a sort of subtitle. The serious one gets to be the page title proper.

This has worked very well in this particular case.

[Beagle]

I often use the "two titles" trick - and I'm the person writing both of them! ;-) Sometimes the fun, creative title can just be part of the page content, as far as any SE's know.

[amandamac]

One of the things I like to do is a title:subtitle, such as:
Green, fluffy widgets and their lint problems: How to defuzz for good.
I don't know about actually placing them on the site - I'm a writer, not a designer :) But it seems to me that when you put the colon in there, it reads well, and I still get to use the word "defuzz," which is just fun :)