Good Blog Titles Get Your Copy Noticed
Posted by David Gibson on Thu, Jun 02, 2011
Good blog titles are extremely important and can have positive effects on things like search engine rankings, the number of people who see your blog, and most importantly, the number of people who read your blog.
Blog post titles appear in RSS feeds, social media sites, search engine results, and links from other sites and bloggers, just to name a few of the places.
Good blog titles should be fairly short, descriptive and interesting. If the title can also communicate a reason the reader will benefit from the information, then more people will stay and read the blog.
Some people report good results by posting their title in color. The title is the first thing a potential reader will see, so whatever you decide, it needs to catch their attention and draw them into reading the information.
Here are some basic guidelines for creating good blog titles:
- Use attention grabbing keywords.
- Avoid slang, esoteric jargon, foreign languages and poor grammar.
- Use simple, descriptive, easily recognizable and memorable titles.
Keywords
Having highly searched keywords in your blog title will help your search engine rankings, and having good blog titles that are similar to your website name will improve your search engine visibility, attracting greater numbers of readers.
You will do well to investigate using long tails (keywords less frequently searched, but bringing you better returns for your site). The more vague or broad your keyword is (example: "televisions"), the more competition there will be for users searching such a term. By using a more descriptive phrase of keywords ("Best Televisions for Video Games"), there will be less people searching the longer term. But, you will rank much higher and have a better capture rate on the ones that do.
Tools and Data
There are a number of plug-ins and analytical tools available that can help you decide which keyword combinations may work the best for you and your website. Continually reviewing the data about how users are interacting with your blog will allow you to make the small changes and modifications needed to attract and keep readers interested in your content.
Good blog titles are the key to bringing visitors to your blogs and getting them interested in the in the information you are presenting. Good strategy, monitoring and ongoing analysis of how your titles are ranking in search engines and what people do when they get to your pages are the keys to creating a popular and successful blog.