One of the things I’m constantly amazed at is how many web publishers miss one of the easiest ways to maximize their positioning in Search Engines by simply including the keywords that they’d like to be found for in their post titles.
I spend a lot of time looking at online articles written on blogs, newspapers and websites and some days it seems that every second or third one has a title that is either cryptic, clever or cute at the expense of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
To put it bluntly – when it comes to blog SEO I believe that your page and post titles are incredibly important. Google in particularly seems to value the words in your title incredibly highly.
Whilst I too feel the temptation to be clever with my post titles from time to time (and sometimes give into it) – I know that if I don’t get traffic from search engines then a fairly significant part of my income will disappear.
So if you’re writing about a new ‘Pink Widget’ have a think about the words that a potential reader will use to search for in Google to find the information you’re presenting. How would you search the net for information on ‘Pink Widgets’?
Without a doubt we’d all include ‘pink widget’ in the search we did. We might refine it by including a third word like ‘price’, ‘review’, ‘advice’, ‘problems’ etc (which may be worthwhile words to include either in the title or body of content) but the best words to include in the title are ‘pink widgets’ – if you don’t you’ve got virtually no chance of being found for that search term unless no one else is writing about them.
Keep in mind that research shows that people search the web a lot for names of products and people and that they are often quite specific their searches. If you’re writing about something specific make your title reflect this.
Of course it’s worth saying that it’s not as simple as just stuffing your titles with keywords – for one they need to make sense (no one will click on a link in Google if its a collection of unrelated words), secondly if you put too many words in your title you run the risk of decreasing their power and confusing the search engines and thirdly you’ll disillusion your regular readers if you mess with stuffing titles with too many words.
My advice is to keep it simple – get to the point with your titles and try get into the shoes of your reader.
