SEO for Blog Titles

I am writing about SEO for blog titles, but I could have decided to be cute or clever with my title. I could have called it, “It’s All in a Name,” or “Ways to Get a-Head.” The only problem is I would like to have a few people actually read this post.

I see a lot of blogs that are well-written and engaging. The bloggers know their topic. But they are probably losing lots of readers by simply not writing a title for SEO. Even though it is fun to be creative with titles, save that for the body of your posts.

SEO for Blog Titles for Beginners

Most people will find a blog post through a search engine, and that search engine will probably be Google. So ask yourself. If you wanted the information that’s in your post, would you type in the phrase you just wrote in your title? If not, then just go to Google and research the topic you’re planning to write about. What did you type in the search? That’s probably a whole lot closer to the right title.

There are a couple reasons why your post title is so crucial. As I just mentioned, you want people who are looking for that topic to find you. The other reason is you don’t want people to find you who want other information. In my example above, I would probably perform better on a search for a term like “baby names” than “SEO for blogs.” Those people will land on my site, be annoyed, and hit the back button.

Once you have that page title nailed, consider it your guiding theme while writing your post, too. It doesn’t do any good to have a search engine optimized title if you never repeat it. Use the phrase again in your first sentence, and reinforce it when it makes sense. You don’t want to go overboard, or people won’t like what they read when they arrive there and you could get penalized by the search engine spiders.

You should also try to reinforce the search phrase you are targeting in image file names and alt tags, use it when linking internally and externally, and use it in your blog post tagging. Use it in your headers.

SEO for Advanced Bloggers

If everything above made you say, “Duh,” and roll your eyes, that’s great. You should consider moving your SEO to the next level. Look at various aspects of your site to see if you’re as optimized as you could be. For example:

• Does your site’s meta title show in the browser as “your site name : blog post title?” If so, you might be fine with that. If you have a blog on SEO, you might want that to show first every time. But this is mighty valuable SEO real estate here, so you should consider either flipping it so your blog post title shows first or eliminating your site name altogether.
• Be sure that your blog uses the post title in the URL. In search ranking, the URL is a high value position. If you blog posts display as a number or some other cryptic URL, you’ve wasted that space. For instance, if you click the title above, you will see that this page’s permalink URL is the post title at the end.

Written by kelbycarr from Kelby Carr
Posted on August 14th, 2007 and filed under Search Engine Optimisation
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