How can I place keywords at the begining of a title and have it look natural?

Question

As per the question Does the order of keywords matter in a page title?, the first word in the title tag is usually treated with more importance than the rest of the title tag. How can I write naturally looking titles with the keyword that I'm targeting being the first word in the title, without resorting to doing something like this: keyword - real title?

Answer 1

For many pages you can't, not without making the title either undescriptive or really awkward and spammy at least. Frontloading is a really unnatural way to write.

If you have general topics, like Wikipedia pages, then it's easy to do something like:

• Labradors
• Labrador training
• A/C repair

But most blog articles, news posts, etc. out there aren't generic encyclopedic knowledge though. If you're lucky, you can make the title a declarative statement or proposition:

• Audis are fun to drive
• SHA1 vulnerability found

You can also define the keyword using a colon:

• SEO: It is essential for your website.
• Stack Exchange: the best website online.

But if the topic has a subject and an object or multiple subjects then it becomes unnatural to try to clump the topical nouns immediately together at the front of the sentence/title:

• Mark Walberg was Marky Mark -> Mark Walberg Marky Mark was
• Beyonce wins Song of the Year at 2009 Grammys -> Beyonce's Grammy 2009 Song of the Year win
• "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" -> Software Development Rewrite Code You Never Do Should
• The Complete Guide to Writing Frontloaded Titles -> Frontloaded Title Writing, the Complete Guide
• "Why File Upload Forms Are A Major Security Threat" -> File Upload Forms Security Threat Major

As you can see, the frontloaded variants are much less user-friendly/readable. In most cases, you end up just removing the verbs/conjunctions/articles/etc. (or placing them at the end, where they serve zero purpose, and you might as well just leave them out) and sound like someone trying to speak a language they're not fluent in.

As you can probably guess, I'm not a big fan of this search engine policy. I don't think the Google engineers or whoever came up with it understands how people use language, and he's definitely not a writer himself.