HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR BLOG POST TITLEs? Three simple ways

Optimizing your blog post titles is very crucial and important if you are interested in drawing traffic may it be from search engines, blog directories or social bookmarking sites etc. Your post title is the name that you give to your post when you write a new post. It appears as a heading in bold letters (normally) above the post body when you open a post page. It gives an unique identity to a post. This post will discuss in detail – How to optimize your blog post titles?
Before explaining – how to optimize your blog post titles? let me first give you some important reasons – why you should optimize your blog post titles?. This is because I think we humans always try to reason out – why we should do a particular thing? before starting to do it. And if we get satisfactory reasons then it becomes easier for us to do that particular job. So here are the reasons :-
1. Attraction – Your post title is the first thing that a visitor reads when he opens a post page so it must be attractive and appealing as this will further encourage the reader to read the post fully.
Also in search result pages the title of the post appears on the top and generally a person who is doing the search looks through the titles to find what he is looking for before clicking the link to visit the page. So a well descriptive and good title will naturally attract a person doing a search.
Even in blog directories and social sites visitors scan the title to look for topics that may interest them before clicking on a link to visit a page.
2. SEO – This is the most important factor for which you need to optimize your blog’s post titles. Search engines rank each page separately and gives heavy weightage to post titles when ranking the pages in SERPs. The keywords included in the title tells the search engines what the page is about and accordingly ranks a particular post page based on relevance. Though it is said Google ranks a page based on 200 different factors but the page title and inbound links are given the maximum importance.
We all know that search engine traffic are much more targeted compared to other sources of traffic (social sites etc) so they are very important when monetizing your blog.
Steps To Optimize Blog Post Title – Here are the steps that you need to follow to optimize your post titles :-
1. Keyword research – Do proper keywords research before starting to write a post and find out the relevant keywords that are searched the most. You obviously need to use a tool for this purpose and the best tool for this purpose is Google Adwords Keywords Tool (free). It is a web-based tool and you just need to type in some relevant keywords into the box provided and click to get keyword ideas. Keep the “Synonyms” box checked. It will give you the search volume of the relevant keywords and their different combinations and synonyms. You can also get the search volumes for the exact words that are searched by selecting the “Exact” option from the drop down menu of “Match Type” situated at the right hand top corner of the table.
2. Utilising the keywords – Put the keywords within the first four or five words of the title to get maximum SEO value as search engines reads from left to right as we humans do. The more the keywords are to the right less is the importance that they get. Also remember that search engines generally takes about sixty characters of the post title into account and discards the rest.
So keep the keywords for which you want to optimise that particular post within the first 4 or 5 words like for example if you want to optimize a post for the keywords “Promote Affiliate Products” then the title “Ten killer strategies to help you promote Affiliate Products” is a bad example in terms of SEO as the keywords are to the extreme right. Whereas the title – “Promote Affiliate Products – Ten killer strategies” will be a good example in terms of SEO.
Also in terms of attraction – putting keywords to the left of titles would naturally tell people about the topic of the post at a glance.
3. Garbage Characters – Avoid using garbage characters like quotes and asterisks because search engines have difficulty in discarding these characters and understanding your post title. So this will hinder your rankings in SERPs.
I hope this post will help you in optimizing and choosing better post titles for your blog posts which will result in more traffic from search engines and also from other sources.