What’s the Purpose of a Title?
The title might very well be the most important part of a blog post, aside from the content itself. The title is what people see first, whether they’re coming across the post from an RSS feed reader, someone’s tweet, a note on Facebook, or anywhere else on the internet.
The title of a blog post is the bait that will lure readers to your blog. It has to grab their attention, and be as informative as possible. In short, it has to tell readers exactly what they’ll find in the following text.
Not only that, but the title of a blog post is very important in search engine optimization (SEO). When a search engine like Google crawls your site, the titles of your posts are big factors in your indexing. What this means, basically, is that what you choose to title your posts will weigh heavily on how easily and frequently your blog will be found.
They key word here is keywords.
These two points that I’ve made, about grabbing the reader’s attention and being easy for search engines to find your content, go hand in hand. If you’re doing one properly, chances are the other will fall in line.
Cold, Hard Evidence
Early on in my blogging “career” (and I use that term very loosely) I knew what SEO was, but didn’t really have an idea of how it could impact a blog. I knew that it could increase traffic by making your site visible in search engines, but without any first-hand experience of how this happened, it was just some fanciful creature lurking behind a veil of mystery. Like elves, gremlins, and eskimos.
Then one day, almost three years ago now, I just happened to make a post on a personal blog about how one might go about setting up two different iTunes installations to use the same library. (You can read the instructional article over at Astro-Geek:3000.) I titled the post “Share Your iTunes Library Between Multiple Computers.” I didn’t really put much thought into this title; it just kind of wrote itself. After all, that’s what the post was about.
Over the course of a month or so, I started to see people visiting my blog from search engines. More specifically, they were visiting that iTunes post. Now just for the record, prior to all this, the only traffic I ever got on any of my blogs was from friends; search engine traffic was non-existent.
People were finding the post by searching Google for phrases like “share itunes on two computers,” “itunes on multiple computers,” “use itunes library on multiple computers,” and the like. Now at the time, I didn’t really think much of this. I just passed it off as a fluke, more or less. After a few more posts, I got bored with the blog and stopped posting.
Staying Power
About a year after I stopped posting to that particular blog, it flitted into my mind again, so I decided (just for grins and giggles) to see how it was doing. I expected the Stats graph to be flatlined at zero. What I found, however, was that an average of about twenty people were visiting the blog every day. More specifically, they were finding that iTunes post through search engines.
After a year of inactivity, of not even logging in to the blog, the strength of that post’s title was still bringing in twenty people a day. How do I know it was the title and not just the content? Well, I’m sure it was a combination of the two, but most of the search terms that led people to the post were very similar to the title of the blog post.
Lesson Learned
So what did all of this teach me about post titles and SEO? When considering a title for your post, take into consideration how readers might go looking for the content you’re presenting. Don’t get all snarky and cute with your titles; just cut to the chase and don’t waste your reader’s time. Using my iTunes post as an example, people who were looking for the information I presented in that post were looking for a way to share their iTunes library between multiple computers.
The title satisfied the two points made at the beginning of this post: it grabbed the reader’s attention (those that were looking for that solution, anyway) and it tells them exactly what they’ll find in the post. And in doing so, the title was effortlessly optimized for indexing by search engines.
