What SEO blogs say: “titles should be x amount of characters, and should contain a keyword”
What the Google guidelines say: “titles should be accurate and descriptive“

What you should actually do…
The role of a page title is to describe the page for users to decide if they want to read it. Most people think “I want everyone to like my title so I will make it enticing to the broadest range of people possible.”

You should not entice the most possible, you should entice the people who will enjoy your page or find your page helpful.

Doing otherwise is dumb. Really dumb.

Every single person who is reading this has clicked on a title like “How to do this or that in five minutes” and then have been disappointed by the article. Clicking on it was a waste of time. It sucked because you really wanted to do “this or that” in five minutes. Grrrrrrrr, you said. That sucked.

Enter Author rank

Everyone is talking about author rank. “It is a game changer” many have stated, but the same people who have said that have really really crappy, misleading, or as it is known in SEO circles “marketable” titles.
If you are enticing the wrong people to read your stuff, and your stuff isn’t pleasuring people you are screwed. Your name is screwed, your brand is screwed, and your rankings will be affected.

Go through your titles. Really do it.
Go through each one and decide if they are descriptive, accurate and enticing to the right people.

If you have enticing “clickable” titles, that lead to crappy or unuseful content, I will laugh at you and the way your rankings will begin to drop.
If you don’t review every title you have ever made, you are dumb, particularly if you are using Google authorship.

[white_box] Like this post? then you will love this… The hitchhikers guide to linkless SEO [/white_box]

If your content gave you no benefit whatsoever until a year after you post it, would you still take the time and effort to put it on the web?

You probably wouldn’t. But you know who would?

Virtually everyone else on the Internet except marketers and people trying to make money.

Who complains about Google not indexing them? Is it professors publishing their research for others in their field #no or is it affiliate site owners? #yes

This is a metric, a ranking metric, and an easily identifiable one.

I really think trying to monetize your content too quickly is one of the most common mistakes on the web.

If you design a new site and one of your biggest worries is where the ads will go, you are messing up and setting yourself up for disappointment. Your motivation isn’t the content it is money. It is woefully easy for Google to see your motivation. Motivation is a metric… whether you like it or not.

If you want to do well on the web and you are trying to do so with content and you are serious about wanting to make money from the Internet than I would concentrate on what is lacking in your niche, not what ad format to use, or where the perfect ad placement is.

I ask myself a very simple question when I make a new site…

What can I do with my ad real estate that will improve the users experience? 

Most of your competition is using all that great webpage real estate on ads, that is a crack in their armour! You can do things they can’t and offer a more pleasant rewarding experience to your users than they can because they are using that space for ads.

The days of instant ranking are over. You can instantly rank something, but it wont be there   for long. If you want quality results, have quality content.

Pleasure your users and you cant go wrong.

Take a moment and ask yourself what you would do with your adspace if you weren’t serving ads.

Want to still make money too? Be cleverer. How can you make money below the fold… that is the future baby.

I tweaked my Image SEO Tool and bought me a new domain name (imageSEO.org) and made it look more professional and such…

The tool will look at a web address and examine the images found there. It looks at the ALT text, dimensions, titles, etc and displays what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong as far as the Google image and webmaster guidelines go.

It is a pretty cool tool. In case you missed the earlier link…

Image SEO Tool

Feel free to share it and like it and such. Thanks.