So you’ve done your initial keyword research, you have your list of “middle spectrum” keywords, and you have some broad topics you think your readers might be interested in. Now it’s time to get down to business and actually start writing.
However, it’s still not time to start writing your articles or posts. First you need to come up with some engaging titles.
Why Titles Matter
Titles are crucial for many reasons. Interesting, engaging titles will obviously capture more reader’s interests and cause more people to actually follow through and read your article. People now have a limitless supply of content at their fingertips and the only way you are going to compete is if you can capture their attention at a glance.
Is Anyone Listening?
Compare it to standing in a room full of people all talking about a wide variety of interesting topics, all trying to capture the attention of a woman standing in the middle of the room. You open your mouth and start talking about how to calculate the average density of mud… you lost her in the first 3 seconds. She ends up listening to the guy who started his speech with a Top 10 list that exposes secret money-saving home renovation tips.
Developing Search Engine Optimized Titles
While only the engineers at Google and the other search engines know exactly how much weight is given to various factors, there is wide agreement that your title tag still plays a vital role. In other words, Google looks at the title of your page to determine what that page is about. If your keywords don’t appear in the title or body of your page, than Google may determine your page is about something else.
This gets into a bit of an SEO grey area. Google wants you to write for humans, not search engine robots. This means writing relevant, useful content for your site’s visitors, and not trying to stuff keywords into the content in an attempt to rank higher.
However, Google also makes it clear that some amount of search engine optimization is acceptable and they even advise you to do it. In their guidelines, it is made clear that its ok to include your keywords on your page, as long as its done naturally and not done in an attempt to manipulate their ranking algorithm.
Bottom Line: If you can work the keywords into your titles, while still creating titles that are natural and will still make sense and be appreciated by humans, do it.
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