The title of a blog post is important for search engine optimisation (or in other words ranking high up on web searches) because the words in your title are used by the search engines to fish out sites for web search results. If you’ve spent yonks on writing a blog post (that you’d love to share with a wider audience) you don’t want it to get lost in sea of other blog posts and sites by not giving your post an equally strong title. In this post I am going to give some tips on writing titles that will hopefully please readers and the search engine robots. This post was inspired by Shannon who was kind enough to share some of her knowledge of good SEO. Thanks Shannon!
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Tips on writing blog post titles that will help your blog stand out:
- Is it a tutorial? – if yes than say so. I enjoy writing tutorials and folks generally love a tutorial. How many times have you web searched for a tutorial on how to do something or another? Lots of times I bet. Make your tutorial easier to find on the the web to find by beginning the blog post title with ‘Tutorial on…’ or ‘How to…’.
- Does your post include a list of information or a breakdown of points? If yes than say so in your title eg. “My 10 top tips for….” Lists/bullet points are easy to digest for the reader and they are an easy way to organise information for the writer (that’s why I like them so much!)
- Is your post about a rant, a happy experience, a memory etc.? If yes than say so in your title eg. “Why I love nothing more than…” or “The …est day of my life was…”. Blog posts which offer an intimate peek into the life of the writer always stir an interest in readers because as humans we are fascinated by each other. Great isn’t it?
- Keep your titles shorter rather than longer. Try to be succinct, but at the same time informative. Search engine robots only read a certain number of words so longer titles tend to get cut short. So your title needs to have the most important words in the first half of the title (just in case).
- Writing the title for yourself vs writing the title for search engines. If you are not bothered by appearing high in search engines than (arguably) you would write your posts and your titles in a way that suits you eg. they could be funny, daft, abstract etc. etc. etc. BUT search engine robots/spiders are ultra efficient and totally unfeeling, they don’t care for writing with flair, they are just after cold hard keywords (see below for more info on keywords)
- Try to put yourself in the mindset of your readers – what search terms/words do you think they would type into the search engines? Including words in your title that readers are likely to search for will help your post will appear higher in the search engines.
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Kris is a fun and crafty mom of four. She expresses her creativity as the owner of Jesse Kate Designs, a sewing pattern and machine embroidery brand. Kris also stays busy as the site manager of 
Crissy is the founder of 
Lisa is a generally content (who said generally - don't get her started!) 30 something living in London, who amongst other things sells everything you might need to make unique and lovely handmade handbags at home from her online store 
This really got me thinking, thank you! I’d never really considered the wording of my blog post titles before. The things you need to consider, my!
~Holly
Two Cheese Please
This is a great article. I am new to blogging and probably did not give the post titles the thought I should have. This provides excellent tips.
Thanks for sharing with us all.
@ The Bead Dreamer:
Thanks so much for these tips! I have an etsy shop and am just starting to create a blog. I’m sure these wonderful tips will be a big help to me.
Lissas last blog post..A La Cafe – Reversible Tote
Nice tips, i have a problem in brainstorming the post titles, so this post will definitely help me out, Thanks a lot for the tips
It just what i looking for.
Thank you for your tips.
Great tips, thank you!
Thank you for the info! I never new there was so much to think about!
Cynthias last blog post..Making a Quilt-step 2
It is a constant balancing act to write from the heart and for your readers, and not to please the search engines – and call things something simple, instead of using the keywords. thanks for the good reminders.
If you used the ‘All in One SEO’ plugin, it allows you to write 2 blog titles. One for your audience and the other for the robots. I have used it quite successfully.
Great ideas!
Just to add one:
I found that when I use the ‘|’ character for seperating several terms in the title, it is very effective in actually getting clicks when displayed in search result pages (to see an example you can look for “links dofollow” on google and at the result for my website).