Life is a little strange for search engine optimization (SEO) professionals when it comes to SEO page titles.

Time and time again, I meet with potential clients who get confused about SEO titles and page headers.

People love to call post and page headers “titles” and I can’t blame them. But then I call SEO titles by their name – “titles.” We always sort that out from the start.

Here are 3 other tangled issues you will face once you get past the language issue.

1. Page titles with navigational words often aren’t effective.

Sure, they can contact keywords, but they are not optimized with the right keyword phrase or phrases that your page can rank for on search engines.

2. Overloading SEO page titles with keyword doesn’t work.

It’s widely known that you can cram in 70 characters (including spaces) in an SEO title. But should you? Not always.

Go with your main keyword or keywords and occasionally add more and see if testing proves it’s worth having the extra words.

3. The most sensitive aspect is the brand name.

Do you or don’t you include the company name? I get the branding part. In fact, maybe people will be more likely to click on the blue link on search results (where the SEO title appears) if they see a company name in it. The credibility factor can’t hurt.

But I don’t like to include company names all of the time. They get in the way of clever SEO titles that can attract a visitor and also appear with social media mentions. If a company name has a keyword in it, that’s worth thinking about and leveraging.

The bottom line is that the approach depends on your web site. Be open to different ways of handling SEO page titles rather than settle for something uniform in all cases.