How to write a great blog post title

The title is an extremely important element of a blog post : It describe your article and it also add a lot of SEO value to your posts. The title is also what people will see in Search Engine Results Pages as well as in Social Bookmarking sites and Twitter.

In the first part of this article, let’s study how to create blog posts title that will definitely add value to your blog and make people want to go read the related article.
Then, I’ll show you some killer tips to optimise the <title> tag on your blog to get better exposure in SERPs.

Be descriptive

I’m maybe stating the obvious, but the primary role of a title is to describe a content, ie, your blog posts. Believe it or not, but everyday I see lots of irrelevant titles, or title that should have been better.
Bad example : SEO tip
Good example : How to write a great blog post title

“Sell” your posts

Yes, sell. As the title is the first thing that visitors will see, in SERPs or social bookmarking sites, it is absolutely important to convince them that your article is worth a visit and that they will learn something by reading your post.
Bad example : Tips to get new subscribers
Good example : How to have 1000+ RSS subscribers in 4 weeks

Use keywords nicely and try to guess what people are searching for

A good post title is a post that have lots of keywords in it. Words like “super”, “wonderful” or “efficient” don’t add any value to your post titles.
Why? because who’s gonna search Google for “wonderful making money online tips”? Probably, just a few. In the other hand, a lot of people will search for “making money online”.

As an example, I own a French blog about visiting New York City. 95% of the traffic comes from Google. If you take a look to the post titles, you’ll see that the important keyword “New York” is often repeated, because people will search for “Restaurants in New York”, not only “Restaurants”. So if the blog post title is “10 delicious vegan restaurants”, people looking for “restaurants in NYC” will maybe miss the post.
Bad example : 50 delicious vegetarian restaurants
Good example : 50 delicious restaurants in NYC

The shorter, the better

The example screenshot above is pretty self-explanatory : Make Big Money Online with…with what? with who? That kind of title isn’t describing anything at all and it don’t convince me to visit the site.
In comparision, the second site have a pretty exiting title (70+ resources to make money online) and there is a lot of chances that it receive more clicks from SERPs than the first link.
Bad example : Read this article and you’ll know 70 ways to make a lot of money online!
Good example : 70+ resources to make money online

Additionnal tips

If like me you are using the Thesis WordPress theme on your blog, you can define a custom title tag directly in the “Edit Post”. This is one of the reasons why Thesis is so cool!

If you don’t, the All in one SEO Pack plugin can add the same functionnality to your blog.

And the last solution, for coders or people who are familiar with PHP, is to use the following hack: Open your header.php file for edition. find the <title> tag, and replace it by the following code:

<title>
<?php if (is_home () ) {
    bloginfo('name');
} elseif ( is_category() ) {
    single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name');
} elseif (is_single() ) {
    single_post_title();
} elseif (is_page() ) {
    bloginfo('name'); echo ': '; single_post_title();
} else {
    wp_title('',true);
} ?>
</title>

This code will generate title tags according to the following model:

• If the visitor is on the blog homepage: We’ll display the blog name.
• If the visitor is on a category page: We’ll display the category name and the blog name.
• If the visitor is on an article page: We’ll only display the article title.
• If the visitor is on a static page: We’ll display the blog name, and the page title.

The result of this recipe can be seen in action on my blogs WPRecipes and Cats Who Code.

Tagged as: seo, title