High Rankings on Search Engines With A Blog Post Title

by Fashionmista aka That IT Girl, Spammy Scammers, and Katie James

EXTRA! EXTRA! BLOG POST TITLES MUST BE SEO JUICY!!
Citizen journalists and industry experts who hope to monetize their blogs have a new challenge as writers/editors with regards to blog post titles. In the old days of print journalism, copywriters worried about how many characters (spaces included) would fit into a space for a great headline that would sell papers and keep readers. Headlines were clever ink prints on a page. On the Internet, however, they are links, cannot be touched with anything but a mouse, and they can make or break your popularity in the search engines. Why? Search engines love them, and people love them. Search engines can reward a blog post title with high rankings, and a person needs to click it to contribute to the traffic to your website or blog.

First of all: What is the blog post title and where do you find it? Read about the title tag with pictures here first.

In the Search Engine Age, however, writers have at least two new challenges:
1. Get the article to even rank highly in search engines, aka being #1 on Google or at least on the first page of search results. Search engines place a lot of ranking value on the page title. On a website, you can usually easily set your page title. On a blog, usually your blog post title doubles as the page title. While considering your blog post as a potential high ranking web page, the search engines pay close attention to what words you use in your blog post title. In the case of this blog post, it is titled: "High Rankings on Search Engines Using Your Blog Post Title"

Example: Let's say you article is all about "essie nail polish" and how their new colors are based on candy. If your blog post title is: "Yummy Nails"  but the content in that blog post is all about how essie nail polish was inspired by candy, and how your nails can look like pastel pieces of rock candy, then you have just shot yourself in the foot for ranking for the following words: essie, nail polish, candy, color. None of them are in your blog post title, as cute as it is. The search engines would most likely give you higher rankings with "Essie's New Rock Candy Color Nail Polish." You can get more clever with it, but the goal is to at least have essie and nail polish and color in your post title, because those terms may be what people are searching for.

How do you know what keywords people are searching for? You use Yahoo's free tool, Overture, or you pay for the keyword research tool Keyword Discovery. Everyone uses Overture, so it can be slow at times. But otherwise gives reliable results.

2. Grab the reader as they scan the list of blue titles in search engines to see which ones they want to click. Your titles need to be quick, short and to the point. This can be tough, if you're trying to get keywords in there. Sometimes you may need to take the SEO hit if you want your feed readers to click, rather than a search engine ranking. Read this to see how your ranking title looks in a search engine.

To follow my own advice, I dropped my usual "Design/Tech Stuff" from this article, because you know what? It's a waste of words and space. I'm trying to rank highly for "ranking high on search engines" with this post, so I needed to get those terms into my title, and close to the front of the title for people to see quickly. I checked Overture before writing the article, and saw that that phrase has about 900 searches, so I'm good for at least some click overflow. I'm not going to get 900 clicks, or even 300 because I need more links pointing to this exact post, and I need more links coming from this article, and maybe a picture. And, there are a bazillion established articles that are already beating me for this highly competitive term, so competition is tough. I'm aiming for related keyword phrases that people will find this post on, which lets me write a more targeted post around their exact term.

The point is: be cute in your blog post titles, but make sure your keywords are in there!! You may need to curb your creativity a little.  :)

Comments

[Denene Brox]

Great information! I noticed that visitors were coming to my blog last week because of a blog post title. So keywords in your title do work. It's so much fun to learn all about this stuff! Thanks for the useful info!

[Tolits Bana]

For your keyword research try using KeywordSpy - a keyword research technology that will help you know what keywords your competitors are using and how it generates money for them, you can use those keywords to drive traffic to your site and give your business the exposure it needs. It offers Free trials.

It goes with a ClickBank Affiliates Search Engine where you can see the actual market landscape at ClickBank.