Do you write your article/post title based on main SEO keyword or you make it appealing for readers to click ? This is one question which every blogger/site-owner faces and the strategy he chooses from this determines the blog’s SERP’s/traffic and viewership. So, which one’s better, SEO based or appeal?
Lets start with basics……[I love them, sometimes you’ll get to know something new or scroll down to last]
What is a blog title ?
Well, its your blog-post or your article heading, generally in <h1> or <h2> tags which defines the scope of the article. For more technical folks: we’re referring to the <h1>TITLE</h1> not <title>TITLE</title>.
What is the importance of the Title ?
An awesome title can communicate a full message to its intended audience. According to the SEO Gurus, headlines do have a magnetic pull; it is indeed the most important factor in visibility of your content. Whenever you Digg your article or submit it on various social bookmarking sites, it is the title which gets full reader attention. Not to mention the title is shown in SERP’s and is the single main factor of the on-page SEO which holds the maximum importance.
The seven main ingredients of a worthy clickable title are [ref: SEOMoz]
- Curiosity
- Benefit
- Emotion
- Tangible
- Appearance
- Sound
- Expectation
More the curiosity more would be the clicks. Copyblogger.com have published numerous articles based on the most important factor of the blog post i.e. TITLE OF THE POST.
The Title Tag should be 50% for SEO (ranking) i.e. including your most important keywords and 50% for clicks i.e. a click worthy title.
How should I write awesome blog titles?
Keep your URL’s clean, focused and optimized as possible. Have a look at the URL as well as the post title of Avinash Kaushik’s (The famous Analytics Guru) Blog post.
The URL is much more keyword centric whereas the post title is a combination of main keywords and tempting words to make the post title click worthy.
One more noticeable thing is the switching the order of words in the URL for better ranking. I think you got the point how to arrange your title as well as URL.
Now the question which strikes is how long should be the title?
SEOMofo’s experiments show that Google is truncating title tags based not only on number of characters, but also on the pixel width of your title tag.
When I searched my article by giving the post title itself, see the search result.
Google truncated my post title approximately after 64 words including spaces. It looks like short and search friendly title have increased in importance.
Now how can you write titles to make it more click worthy.
Lately you have been reading lot of posts articles like “How to..”, “Top 10 tips to…”. Here are some of the new methods you can try using various tempting words or sentences like “The secret of….”, “Little known ways to….”, “Here’s a quick way to…”, “Now you can have….” Etc.
Lastly summarizing
Keep your titles short [45 chars] and appealing, make your url’s more keyword friendly, jumble keywords in URL’s for better SERP’s.
After all, Headline or Title is the first impression of the blog post and as the saying goes “First impression is the last impression”.