Blog post titles should remind you of a great meal. Putting a title on a blog post isn’t a game to see how many words to jam into one line. It’s your first chance to impress the search engines. Follow these tips to making your post titles count!
- Use “Meat and Potato” Words. When I think of a good meal I think of a steak, a baked sweet potato, some healthy greens and maybe an egg (just because I like them). Search engines look for the words and phrases people are interested in– they pretty much ignore tiny words like “the” and “a” and “an”. These tiny words are like the peas on a plate… they just don’t matter. What does matter are the nouns, verbs, and adjectives because these are the words people are actually searching.
- Know Your Keyword or Key Phrase. Search engines will search all the words and phrases in your post, but you should have one phrase that is the subject of your post and know that it’s also the phrase you’re anticipating people will search. Use this keyword or phrase in your title!
- Put The Keywords First. If at all possible put the keyword or phrase at the front of the title.
- Keep Titles Short. Google only reads displays a short piece of a blog post title (again, that’s a good reason to put keywords first!). If you wax poetic and create a long title you’ve lost the search engines by the end of the title.
- Watch Your Words— If Google and the other search engines are only going to display part of a long blog post title, then you don’t want your title cut off at a point where the title conveys a negative message, an offensive statement, or just looks meaningless.
Go forth and write some awesome titles!
