Ladies Who Launch

Creating a Page on Facebook

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

If you use Facebook for personal reasons, you can certainly use it to help your business, whether you have a service or product based business. Facebook developed a way for your business to have a presence in its social network: the Page. A Page is an interactive, well, page, that showcases whatever you can think of regarding your business. A Page can't have friends, but people can "fan" it, or become a fan (ps: a Page cannot become a fan of another Page). And fans are good. Here's what happens when your Facebook page has fans:

• Updates: you can send updates about your products or services to your fans
• Logo: your logo shows up on their profile page in a little square shape
• Pictures: you can post pictures of your products, or of any other type of graphic
• Applications: Pages are able to work with Applications. Applications are the tools that make your page interactive with people viewing your Page. Here are some examples of applications being used on the Ladies Who Launch page (ahem...have you fanned it yet??)

How to Create a Facebook Page

When you are logged into your account in Facebook, look to the left of your screen, and under Applications, there should be "Ads and Pages". Click it. If it's not there, do a search for it, and you may get it that way.

Look around for a button that says "+ Create Page". Click it.

Fill in the questions they ask you. If your business does not depend on Local results, then you probably want the second option, which is "Brand or Product", and then you'll get another pulldown.

Naming your page: I'm pretty sure that once you insert the name of your page, you can't change it. So no typos! But you could always create another one.

Examples of Applications for the Page
The nice thing about Pages, vs Groups, is that you can add more things to them, like an RSS feed box, or a "Big Photo" or other applications. Here is what they look like on the Ladies Who Launch Facebook Page:

"Big Photo"

The RSS Feed

Good luck and have fun!!

Blog Post Titles are Super Important for SEO

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

Ladies!

I just love tweaking copy on websites in those special SEO hot spots, tracking the results, and then blasting to everyone what I find. This tip is an easy one, and we've covered it before: Page Titles are Super Important. I just changed a few little words in one of my blog posts titles, and it moved from page 1 #6 in google to page 1 #2 in google in one week.

This is a GREAT way to try and increase your traffic by little numbers at a time. If you pay attention to your stats, to your comments, to what your readers are saying, you will see how you can change particular blog post titles and double your traffic to that page. If you are getting 10 hits to a post page per month, you could get 20. If you did this to 10 posts, that's 100 extra very relevant hits per month. I measure this for big and little websites - from one that has tens of thousands of users a month, to my own little blog (FashionMista), which is what I'm about to share. On a larger website, you can change your targeted keyword on one page to a better one that you found by doing your keyword research (try Keyword Discovery) and pick up 4,000 per month, up from 1,000. BUT, you could also have the reverse effect, and change what isn't broke, and start to slide down. So always do your research.

Here's what happened for my little blog: I am getting laser hair removal done on my legs, and am blogging about it. The intent (and thus my target keyword) was to blog about "laser hair removal". Therefore, I had that term in all blog post titles, in links where possible, and in any pictures (alt attribute). What I did not intend was to become a voice for/against American Laser Center (ALC), which is where I'm getting it done. But, that is what has happened. My blog posts naturally optimized for "american laser center review". Why? Because some other review type websites linked to my main page, people commented with those words, and I said "american laser center" a lot.

The other day, I got a comment on my main laser landing page from a girl who said something like: "I know this post was done in 2005, but it still comes up number 1 for a search on american laser center reviews, so I'll post a comment to warn..." Unhappy ALC people seem to find my blog, and comment about it. Which is fine. But anyway, I hadn't been following my ratings for this term, and sure enough, I was #1 for "american laser center reviews". I was #6 for the singular version (review). But I wanted to be higher. :) What's an SEO  girl to do? Change the post title.

My blog post title was: "Laser Hair Removal: I Got Lasered" I liked it because it seemed compelling to me, and suggests journal entries. But, after learning that I was #1 for "reviews", and #6 for "review", and wanting to rule in both terms, I changed it to: Laser Hair Removal: My Experiences and Reviews at American Laser Center."

That's it. I just changed the blog title. I actually edited the article to make it more current, explain that it was a work in progress, and did drop in "review" in more places.

The result? Doubled traffic in one week.

Pay attention. You are your own gold mine.  :)

ps: Here is an article on a blog post title with pictures

pps: Rankings mentioned here are subject to change at any time...so I better stay sharp!

Easy SEO Technique to Bring Traffic: Google Images

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

Hi Ladies:

A quick and easy way to bring in traffic while you sleep: use images in your web posts or pages, set their alt attributes, and link them to something if possible. This might get your image, and your website, found in Google Images. What does that mean? It means that if you are going to blog about something, include a picture, fill in its alt attribute, and write your post with your keyword phrases woven in. Let's break down this image recommendation:

1. You want to blog about the super cute rolling shoes that kids roll around on, but you want them for adults. You will create a "post" about this (aka web page, but if it's in blogging software, it's sometimes called a blog post), titling the post something like "Super Cute Heely Roller Shoes for Adults". I did not keyword research that, and guessed, but I do know from my own website stats that "heely roller shoe" is a searched for term.

2. You need a picture of a heely roller shoe. If you are not blogging on your own products, and you need to find the image, especially if it's a product, go to Amazon.com. Do a search for the shoe, right click on the image you want (Mac users: hold down your "ctrl" key next to the space bar and then click), and select Save to Desktop, or something simular. This sucks the image down onto your computer. Most likely, the file name is something like 2349875thiefuodjrw8.jpg, which makes no sense. Rename it to heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg. This may or may not help in search engines rankings, but it can't hurt. Now you can upload it via your blogging software (Blogger lets you do this, or Flickr) or upload it to your host. Remember, if you are wanting to use an image from a small company, or a content based organization, you should ask permission and state your use of the image before you do this. It's a good idea to offer to link to that company or organization in your citation. Even with Amazon, it's just polite to link to them if you use their image.

NOTE: it is not advisable to post the image in your website using the other website's code. This is a lazier way of doing it, and does not require that you host the image on your own site. However, doing this is called "hotlinking" and it is theft of bandwidth. You are stealing their bandwidth. Therefore, it is advisable to ask a website if you can use their images first. I wrote a whole article on hotlinking here. This is also not advisable because if that website removes those images, you will have an error graphic where the image once was.

2. You will increase the image's chances of getting listed in the first pages of Google Images for the specific keyword term if you fill in the alt attribute. This was created to help the blind know what the image is, so it's really a descriptive term of what the image is. It will not show up on your live website page. In the code, the alt attribute looks like this: alt="descriptive term here"

If you have to go into the code, vs your CMS or blogging software letting you access it a different way, the code for the image and alt attribute would look like this:
<img src="http://www.fashionmista.com/images/heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg" alt="pink heely roller shoe">
I only bolded it to show you where it is. It won't be bolded in real life.

3. For your copy, get the actual keyword word as close to the image as possible. Google will read the copy on your page and show the image that is closest to it in Google Images.

That should be it! Pay close attention to your website stats to see what is working and not working, making adjustments all of the time. Good website stat programs are Google Analytics and Statcounter. Google Analytics will keep a history of your stats, but Statcounter will only keep it for 100 hits at a time. Each have their benefits, like how Statcounter gives you real time results in a consice way, whereas you have to wait a day before Google's presents the full results.

Any questions, just ask in the comments.

 

Good luck!

SEO/Social Networking Tip: Facebook pulls and uses your Meta Description Tag

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

SEO (search engine optimization) gurus have been saying that meta description tags aren't worth very much anymore in Google's eyes. Blogger, Google's blogging platform, doesn't even let you put any in. So as a business owner with lots on her plate, one less thing to worry about on the website is almost a blessing. Or is it...

Before I continue, let's review what meta description tags are. You can click here for meta description tags broken down with pictures, but I'll recap. The meta description tag is unique to every page. It describes what is on the page, and definitely uses the keywords you have placed into your content, alt tags in images, linked content, etc. While it might not have very much pull anymore when a search engine is evaluating your page (aka if you don't have one, it won't kill ya), it is used other ways that is important to actual people's eyeballs when they are evaluating your page. You won't see it on the page itself, but it can be displayed in other places, such as in the search engine results (see these pictures for an example).

While the meta description tag might not be a heavy weight on the technical side, it is a heavy weight for a person's eyeballs, which now includes eyeballs in Facebook. When you "Post a Link" in Facebook, or leave a link on someone's "Wall," Facebook will automatically search for and pull available pictures from the webpage. You'll get to choose which image you want displayed. It also grabs the first line of copy from that page and displays it, as a teaser. However, if you have a meta description tag, it displays the content in the meta description tag.

Example: an LWLer Galia Gichon is  giving a financial seminar "Whip Your Finances Into Shape" with the Freelancers Union. I posted it as a link on the Ladies Who Launch Group page in Facebook. The first sentance was pulled: "Baffled by where your money is going? Does retirement seem unreachable? Anxious about uneven income? Tired of living paycheck to paycheck, or just without a realistic financial plan?" After a quick look at web page's source code, as far as I can tell, there is no meta description tag. So Facebook pulled and displayed the first line of the page.

However, when I answered someone in Facebook about where to find my sexy sleep masks (just got in a new batch!), I gave her the direct link, and my meta description tag was pulled: "Perfect for travel, Saturday morning sleep-ins, and afternoon catnaps. This silk sleep mask is reversible with a lining to block out the light, thanks to the black silk dupioni." If you go to this page, you'll notice that you can't see this text on the page. It's under the hood, in the code. Only search engines and other computer robot things can see it, and then spit it back out when called for.

So, it's just a new light shed on your meta description tag, so that as you write it, you'll have a better idea of who and when it might be read.

And, if you have a website based entirely in Flash, this will not work for you! Flash basically acts like a projector, throwing a website on a screen with no way to pull the little elements from it, like pictures and text. If you want to learn more about Flash based websites, I wrote a whole post about it here.

Participate in Social Sites...I'm Telling You...

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

We've already had this discussion, and some of you were understandably concerned about wasting time in these social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace if it suits you, blogs, StumbleUpon, etc.. I maintained to keep track of your actions, and cut out what isn't working. Ask yourself questions like "Is your website getting traffic from the source?" If not, are you gaining friends or followers, who could get exposure to your products or services in other creative ways? Or is the whole thing just a bust and you cringe to think about it. If you have the cringe factor, then re-evaluate your approach, or abandon ship.

But I've got to tell you, I was checking my Facebook, an action I try not to do every day, and after signing up for and playing a bit of The Oregon Trail, I checked one of the emails in my Inbox (my Facebook inbox...I call it Face-mail). It was from a guy I didn't know. Suspect? Yes. Curious? Yes. Turns out he's a reporter from the Wall Street Journal doing a story on the writers' strike. I support the writers' right to potentially lucrative money from online content. However, I was quite excited when Jon Stewart was coming back. I also want the crew to have work. So I watched. I was disappointed in the way Jon addressed the strike. I visited the Jon Stewart Daily Show Facebook Page, of which I'm a Facebook "Fan," and declared my views on the Wall, and suggested we all "unfan" the Page until he either goes back off the air (because it does weaken the strike) or brings more awareness.

Thus, I got contacted by this journalist as one of many who may be in his piece on the strike, The Daily Show, Letterman and Leno. Afterwards, he asked about what I did, I quietly gave my web and blog sites which he took. So, set up your own luck, folks.

Design/Tech Stuff :: What's in a Signature

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

The best hiding places are the most obvious ones, right? Or the best weapons? Candlestick on the mantle. I don't have a fireplace, but if I did... We spend so much energy looking for the best places to advertise and socialize, and then we spend some more energy finding out what worked and didn't work for others - what website is the best investment, but what are their demographics, and do you care if you sold or instead got brand awareness.

Enter the email signature. The guaranteed little placement at the bottom of every single email you send out. It's free. It gets delivered. And it goes to people you know and most likely support you, which means they want to know what you're doing. Plus, you form new contacts all the time, so with your email signature, you are passively selling your entrepreneurial self.

Here's mine:
: website : www.katie-james.com
: blog : www.fashionmista.com
: other blog : www.thatitgirl.blogspot.com
: spam prevention blog : www.spammyscammers.blogspot.com
: etsy : www.katiejames.etsy.com
: stylehive : www.stylehive.com/person/fashionmista/grid
: facebook group Global Mistas Inc : http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5791719372
: cell : 555.555.5555

See how easy that was? And you can get creative with the layout, add your logo, etc. etc. But remember, this is not in print! So you can change this every day if you wanted. If you needed votes in a contest, include your pitch: "Vote for me in the Super Great Contest I Entered! It's really easy! Click on this link: www...." I've had website clients see an accessory design contest I'm hoping to score in, and they vote! Did I ask them to? No! It's out of the goodness of their hearts kind of thing. And they liked the idea.

The part where it becomes a chore is when you have a few emails. But really, it's a minor chore. I am email obsessed, so I have three ways of answering email from one email account: my Mac mail on my computer for the pretty "ding", gmail for global access and backup, and my iPhone (also Mac mail). If my signatures are the same, you never know if I'm walking down Broadway, sharing a cafe, or dutifully at my desk.

But don't stop at the email address. Include these links in forums you frequent, if you want your information in a totally public place (unless you're in a private forum). Forum members will click on your links, people coming in from search engines into that forum thread, etc. Warning: I wouldn't do this in blogs. Blogs are generally for Comments only - meaning, your opinion. Not your five zillion things you need to market. Just my opinion, though.

If you do this already, do you have any success stories from it? Has anyone bought one of your products, or become one of your blog junkies? Share with us in the Comments below!

Design/Tech Stuff :: Social Networking 101 with Bookmarks

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

Social Networking is huge. It's huge in concept and it's huge in people who use it. What is  "social networking," and isn't networking social anyway? Yes. "Social Networking" as a term that in this day in age means to have a presence beyond your website on other websites that are built specifically to bring people together to share resources, tips, thoughts, whatever. Not too long ago, it was said that having a website was as necessary as having a business card. Still true. Now you need more. There are so many websites in the world, and so many ways to promote them, both free and paid, that your website needs to become larger than itself and work for you when you're sleeping.

Social Networking can be done for free in many ways. "For free" means that your fingers are doing the flying across the keyboard and clicking the mouse, so it's actually your own time that you're spending. And with anything, especially online, manners are very, very important. You could be a huge company, or you could be a little person with a website, and get slammed by online egomaniacs, or highly praised as offering something special and unique. The benefit of social networking, if done organically and with sincerity (although that can sometimes backfire), could mean that you are getting new eyeballs onto your website, onto your logo, reading about your brand, trusting you as a source of great pieces of information, etc.

This article is going to focus on one form of social networking: bookmarking. "Social bookmarking" has taken the old habit of bookmarking something in your own private browser (Internet Explorer, AOL, Firefox, etc.) and moved it to a shared environment. People have created websites that you can go to, freely create an account, and start bookmarking your favorite pages that you find on the web. These can be news articles, pictures, products, videos, and anything else that gets invented to live on the Internet.

Some such websites are StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, del.icio.us, and many, many more. These started out, and remain, a place for people to simply keep track of their websites online, so that they could be accessed from any computer. But now, everyone can and wants to see what everyone is bookmarking, and read, sort of, a specialized newspaper. For this post, we are going to talk about StumbleUpon.com and Stylehive.com.

StumbleUpon.com

Years ago, I created an account at StumbleUpon.com to keep track of articles that had to do with "graphic design" or "seo" or "marketing" or "designer" or anything I wanted to find later that had to do with a topic. Then an online friend turned me onto "photo stumbling," which means I could right click on an image, and because I had an account with StumbleUpon.com and had downloaded it to my browser, a little tool appeared in my list of tools called "Photo Stumble This!"

Suddenly my page of links at StumbleUpon was not only useful to me, but others found it useful too, and now it was pretty because I was photo stumbling photos and products. And then I looked one day at my account, and saw that I had some "Fans" who had pressed a button saying that they liked me. If I liked them back, we could be "Mutual Friends" and then I could see what they were stumbling and learn all about their stuff.

Here's what my Stumleupon page looks like. The latest link is a "photo stumble," so a tan image is showing up there with links and my review of it. To the right are people who have visited my page recently:

The other night, I Stumbled my own article on how to create a Flickr widget/badge thing. But I don't only Stumble my own things. That would be not benefit greater good because there are lots more articles out there. I tend to Stumble articles on tech news, fashion news, designer news, and of course photos whenever I can. So, to keep and build credibility, I stick with the idea on which Stumbleupon was created, which is to share pages, and share as many pages as I have time for - other people's pages, with my own pages mixed in.

Tip: I find that usually when I "photo stumble" a picture at night, that picture can generate about 100-200 hits to the site that I did it to. As proof, go to my burp cloths Etsy page and look to the right to see how many views it got - about 250. That happened in one day. Now visit my photo envelope things, which I did not photo stumble, and see how they got about 20 visits so far. I posted both of these products on the same day.

Stylehive.com

I first learned about Stylehive through a Google Alert I set up for katie-james.com. A girl had "hived" my chocolate brown checkbook covers. Nice of her. Well, later on, I got a sale for a jewelry bag. Sometimes people say where they heard about Katie James when they place their order (thanks to my shopping cart, ZenCart), and this girl did. Stylehive.com. So, a free post that I did nothing to create, for a $24 checkbook cover, landed me a $52 sale of a jewelry pouch. I was so grateful, that I contacted the Stylehive person who hived me (she had a blog linked from her Stylehive page, and I tracked her down), and I offered to send her the brown checkbook cover she liked so much, and she accepted my offer.

Common Sense Networking

What is crucial to all of this is honesty. Which as I mentioned, though, can backfire. So "organic" might be a better word. Serendipitous. Create your own luck sort of thing. But for the most part, if you are going to do something publicly online, like thanking someone, or giving props to a blog by leaving a comment, you'll probably be fine and spreading awareness about your web presence if your profile is linked to your website or blog. However, if you drop a resource that just happens to be yours on a blog comment, be very careful. Bloggers, and now people with these social networking accounts - basically anyone with a voice online - will pick up if you are solely marketing without meaning it. Look at this article (which is stumbled on the LWL Stumbleupon page), which brings to light the touchy subject of "thanking" Stumblers when they stumble one of your web pages. So, you just want to tread carefully.

I did thank a blogger for including my jewelry pouch in her Christmas top 10 list last year (I should have checked my records first though, because she had just bought it!). The preferred method of doing this was to privately email her, but her email wasn't listed anywhere. I thanked her on her blog via a comment, which was all about her pregnancy (and is now about her newborn). Very discreetly, and sincerely, I offered to send her my burp cloth to see if she liked it. Keep it, toss it, whatever. She did blog about it and sent a ton of traffic.

This post has been long enough! There will be more on this type of marketing, but I think this can get you started. There are different ways to use these tools, which is really up to your imagination. And this post title is not unique. Here's a Google search on "social networking 101" to get you more info.

Get Over Your Obsession with Your IP & Build a Community

Is intellectual property ("IP") the only "product" we create now in America?  Before I get a barrage of emails from US manufacturers, that is a rhetorical question. I ask it primarily to get your attention and because sometimes I feel the focus on IP and its value is extreme. I suspect this is because people don't truly understand it. So, they "err on the side of caution" and preclude others from using anything they think is "theirs." It may be a color, a shape, a word, or an idea. It may even be something that the alleged owner blasted via email. 

An author I know recently hit me with such a preclusion. I used to subscribe to her email newsletter because I thought she had good business insight that might be valuable to my clients. I have promoted her openly and at no charge for several months. I have even given her books as gifts at times. Needless to say, she has gotten a lot more value from me than the $15.00 or so I spent on her book. That's why I was surprised to see her request to remove my blog posts referencing her book and newsletter. I included links to her website, her book and her contact information, intending to help her drive more traffic. I mistakenly thought she, too, was a believer in the power of collaboration and connection. 

I am saddened by her attitude, but I again chalk this up to misunderstanding of IP law. I presume she believes I have plagiarized her work and worries this somehow reduces the value of her purported IP. She apparently forgot her days of writing term papers and why we use citations in our writing. Still, considering the bulk of bad information in the world, I can understand. I will follow The Four Agreements and take nothing personally. (By the way, Don Miguel Ruiz, I hope you don't mind me referencing your book and promoting you FOR FREE.) 

In short, if you're obsessing over excluding others from sharing your work with potential customers you might not otherwise reach, perhaps you should reconsider. Exclusivity excludes, and you may exclude someone who would otherwise be among your greatest fans and advertisers. I know one author who has lost me.

A Fancy Pants Website Could Hinder Sales

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

Your high-concept, artful, playful website could be making you all but invisible in the search engines, nearly impossible for people to send a link to a specific product to their friend, and could negate any positive impact from social bookmarking sites like StyleHive.com. Most of the big designers use these types of sites, and I say more power to 'em. It just means that my little website will get more exposure.

To define, a fancy pants website is usually built with a lot of Flash, or another program that animates things to make them extra cool. Animated graphics, in general, are not bad. You just need to be mindful of how they are built, and how they will work. Fancy website pages sometimes look like pages, but they may not generate their own URLs. Your whole website may run off of www.mywebsite.com. Let's look the super cute shoe company, Seychelles Footwear. Go to that website and play with it. It's very fun. Luckily, it can be fun because they sell all of their shoes through stores and other websites that are much better optimized (aka appealing or readable) for the search engines.

The Link Problem
Years ago, I bought some Seychelles. I was so excited that I blogged about what I bought, and the other cute styles. I wanted to link directly to the shoes I was talking about. On the web, it's best to get to the point as quickly as possible. With Seychelles, no can do. I can only link to their home page and figure out ways to finagle some images from other websites like Zappos.com to show what I'm talking about. In fact, I'd be better off linking to Zappos.com, since my readers could fall in love with the shoe, and buy it right then.

The Search Engine Problem
Search engines love links. Links are like vegetables to them. When a search engine visits your site, it 'crawls' or 'spiders' as much of your website as it can by traveling through all the links you have placed. If you have images linked to images, and no text, or no links that go to places that are forbidden to search engines, they stop and miss out on all of the stuff you can SEE on your site. They like to read things. If you have words that are images, for example, and not actual words, the search engine just sees a file called our_mission.jpg. It has no idea that there are words there.

The Usability Problem
If products are spinning by, it's visually exciting at first, but when you go to click on something, it can be a slippery experience. Making your site as easy to use as possible is a good goal to ensure that your users are happy and seamlessly turn into customers.

The Social Bookmarking Problem
I call this Socialness. Social bookmarking is when a web page gets bookmarked on a website by a person. Other people can see what that person bookmarked, and then visit the page. StyleHive.com has a lot of highly interested users looking for fun things, and they will buy. Your products can show up there (if bookmarked , or 'hived' by someone if that product has its own web page. If every product shows up on www.yourwebsite.com, and not on www.yourwebsite.com/products/398lfoifjlsfjow or something obscure to humans but very important to how the internet works, then you could be missing out on a potentially effective bookmark that could drive highly interested people to your products. Example: Coco Ribbon sells very pretty things on their site, and they just redesigned their website. I must confess, I do miss their old one because, I think, each product had it's own URL. So, if I go to put something on StyleHive, StyleHive picks up the product image, price, and description and automatically publishes it on their site. However, with their current setup, pointing out pictures and assigning it to one page is tricky. All of their lingerie items, for example, are under this URL: http://www.cocoribbon.com/collections/lingerie, so I can't link to a direct one, which would get users there quickly, and help that product rank in the search engines. If you don't care about search engines, then this isn't a problem.

The Bottom Line
Using animation and other swirly things is fine. It's great. It can greatly enhance your website. Just ask yourself, before you fall in love with a concept, where you are using it, how it is built (discuss with your programmer your goals, as it might affect how he/she will program this aspect for you) and how it will affect your users, who ultimately, can be your biggest evangelists.

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.  :)