Scraps of Mind

Blog Post Titles – make them meaningful.

Erika (americanmom) from Scrapbook Obsession left a comment on my Blogging 101 post last week

Hi Karen – I loved your instructions for backing up your blog, which I have been wanting to do but was dragging feet in figuring out how. Also appreciated Tip #2 – keep them coming! I’m new to blogging but I have discovered something (by accident) that increases traffic: Blog about a controversial issue and put the relevant words in the title. For example, if you have a scrapbooking blog and you do a post entitled “Martha Stewart Introduces Scrapbook Products”, you will get LOTS of hits because so many scrappers are curious about this. They type “Martha Stewart Scrapbook” in Google and they find your blog!

And she’s absolutely right!

Your blog post title is one of the primary places that the search engine spider bots look for keywords. So if you are blogging a post about a topic that you believe would be of interest to a wider audience than your current group of readers, choose your blog post title carefully. It’s very tempting to title your posts with cute amusing titles (and heaven knows I’m a major culprit of this). But if you are writing about something a bit meaty or informative then you probably want to attract as many readers as possible.

So ensuring your blog post title contains quality keywords can be a major factor in increasing your blog traffic. By that I mean the sort of words or strings of words that people are likely to Google if they were looking for information on your topic.

Erika’s post was about Martha Stewart, an obvious topic of interest to many people. And by including the name in her title, it popped up early in the search engine rankings and drew many new readers to her blog.

I discovered this last year when I put up a post called Music…ughh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. The post was about how I didn’t believe that music was an important part of my life (I subsequently posted a plethora of music related posts, proving that I was completely out of touch with myself). What I didn’t realise at the time was that the song title is often Googled and consequently quite a number of visitors came to my blog on the strength of that.

My consistently top post of all time is H&K Tunstall – The Delicious Dozen. The words in this title are very ‘Googleable’ to many people who are interested in this porcelain and it consistently pulls visitors who are likely to be interested in the content of my blog and may turn into regular readers.

So although it would be a mistake to create a title which does not have any relationship to your post content (readers will just hit, give you the statistic, and disappear, never to return), I recommend that you pay attention to the wording of your titles for your ‘key’ posts.

And by the way, it’s also helpful to repeat your key words a few times through the body of your post (especially in the first paragraph). Just be careful that you don’t overdo it and spoil the flow of your post.

Other related posts:
Blogging 101
Have you backed up your blog?