Helping Us to Help You Promote Your Events With Effective Page Titles
We see our job as getting eyeballs to your content. To do this, we try and create attractive pages that are locationaly relevant for the terms that people might search for. These tend to have a useful page title!
Our ultimate aim is to be seen as a go to resource for people looking for events or to promote an event. To do this, we work hard to improve our visibility in places like Facebook, Twitter and search engines.
Onsite, we can control that approach to a degree and do our best to ensure that eventually, people will find our pages for things like ‘event in location‘ , ‘Location Events’ and other related phrases useful to people looking for things to do or promoting things to do.
That’s up to us, but what we can’t do is tell users what event promoters events are all about. We believe that it is they who are best positioned to do this, hence this little piece that hopefully helps the reader of this piece both appreciate and understand why that is.
We’ve created a more general page here that details some of the other things that people need to be aware of when creating their events, but this piece adds some additional context for the purposes of effective event titles.
It’s all in the name
Many people fail to appreciate how important it is to give some thought and consideration to their event titling. They think that a simple Sports Event, or Carboot Event type titling approach to their titles will work.
Sure, at their essence there might well be very little wrong in terms of description, but an approach like that misses some huge and easy opportunities.
Keep your event titles to a reasonable length – 150 characters is more than enough to convey your message. Use any more and you’re title is likely to be less effective ( see below) . It’s important therefore, to be selective in the words you employ.
It’s of utmost importance to use words in your event title that people are likely to search for - We said that in bold as it just couldn’t be more important.
Lets have a look at two simple examples.
‘Children’s Fun Day Fund Raiser Event in Aid of Cystic Fibrosis’ is a whole lot better than simply ‘Charity Event’ .
or
‘Half Price Super Shopping Extravaganza in London Big Savings and Family Fun’ will again be a whole lot more useful and compelling than an event name that just says ’Shopping Event London’.
In addition to the obvious points of both being far more attractive and of interest. This approach also has a number of additional benefits outside of the page content itself.
Giving The Searcher What They Want – Give Them a Reason To Click
Search engines use page titles as an important determinant of the relevancy and content of a html page.
When a page is returned within their search results, users will often use what they see to determine the suitability to their queries. Through careful consideration of what it is you say, you are far more likely to get that all important click of interest.
A person searching for ‘charity events in aid of cystic fibrosis’ would be very unlikely to find your page returned if you just used ‘Charity Event’ as your title. Through providing the specifics you effectively increase the likelihood of your event being returned as a possible option.
The image below shows an example of this in action. Note the absence of pages that say simple ‘Charity Event’ and observe how many of the results use the specific words in the various listings related to the phrase ‘charity events in aid of cystic fibrosis’.
The simple takeaway here is that through using words that explain what your event is all about, you are far more likely to be returned.
Microformats Have Arrived How We Use Them To Help You
In addition to the above we also use microformats to output our locational content. Microformats are formatting techniques that machines can use to determine additional meaning and context.
In the context of this discussion, search engines sometimes use these to add additional information for more generalised searches.
If we take this search as an example ’Events in Hitchin‘ (link to our page) we will see our particular result returned, with direct links to the event names for that locality embedded into the search snippet which we’ve highlighted in red.
Whilst the event titles in this example are cut short, the specifics are a whole lot clearer than one that was perhaps more basic. Users get to see both the title and the date on which the event finishes, increasing confidence in the page and thus increasing the chance of that all important click.
This of course presents a great opportunity and highlights the importance of using words that are more likely to engage users. An event title that did none of this would be very bland in comparison and would be very unlikely to encourage interest.
We also use your event title extensively throughout the site to attract casual browsers. Through creating engaging, on topic relevant titles, you help increase the likelihood of attracting a viewer. We hope this has helped!
