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I’ve always been concise with my post titles. This is, as I am told, a problem for the web–skimming general populace. The problem with concise titles is that they don’t convey enough information to entice the reader to stop skimming the article titles and read the post.

While trying to create a title for a blog post about some random, anecdotal thing that happened to me this evening, I was going to use a fairly long post title that I figured would amuse…well…me. But the length caused the title to break into several lines. For whatever personal reason, I do not like post titles that take up more than one line.

The irony, of course, that I put together a design with humungous post titles. Therefore, I need a way to break up those long titles. There are at least three ways I know of to achieve this:

1. Truncate your post title, then add it to the post
2. Add break tags (<br />) to the title
3. Go with a shorter title, add the rest to the post

To truncate your post title, you would need to then add additional tags inside your post to differentiate it from the normal text. Not only will this make your post look goofy, it could confuse people. I constantly remind myself that the majority of traffic for this site is from the US, and this is the country that has yet to outlaw soap operas for gross stupidity and contributing to the sloth of the citizenry. That means, stupid people live here, don’t confuse them.

You could add break tags to the post title, but that would cause all kinds of behind–the–scenes problems. Mainly, search engines (read: Google) will index your context with strange HTML entities. Unless you like the way that WordPress will mangle your post title with extra characters, it is best not to give WordPress the chance to mess something up.

What I do (and what I suggest you should do, as well), is just to add that incredible wit and wisdom to your post. That will require another title, but your anecdote probably wasn’t as interesting as you thought it was. Another major benefit of this is it will probably be the best way to make you better as a writer, other than just writing.

The shorter title does not, however, always bode well for search engine optimization (SEO). Sorry. I’m not saying that anyone will read your original, un–formulaic–ly titled post, it’s just that it will look better. The web will look better. I will be able to sleep at night.