Most bloggers spend their time producing hundreds of quality articles that never get a fraction of the organic traffic they deserve. I say organic because most of these bloggers get a lot of direct traffic by commenting their “back side off” but when I review the search engine traffic statistics of many blogs for their main keywords one thing is certain: few get any traffic from the search engines for the keywords of their articles – even when they constantly write about their niche. I am not saying that commenting is a bad tactic. However, failing to adhere to some article optimization rules means that you leave 99% of your potential traffic (and revenue) on the table!
Tip 1: Understand You’re Not Writing For a Newspaper
If you are used to offline copyrighting you will know that the headline is responsible for over 90% of the sales of a book or newspaper. People “buy” catchy titles. Statistically negative headlines attract more readers.
However, choosing headlines for your blog posts is an entirely different case because of the way your articles reach people who have an interest in them. If you wish to have your blog rank up in Google and other major search engines for the keywords related to your topic then offline title writing methods don’t work.
Tip 2: Your Headline’s Keywords Determine Your SEO
Your blog post title is important to your article’s search engine optimization. Especially, the first 3-6 words of your title are crucial to your SEO. Choosing words for your title involves knowing which keywords are used by your potential audience to find what you offer in your content.
Take a look at the following examples that illustrate the difference between a non-keyword rich title and a keyword rich title:
Very bad title example:
“Top 3 Secrets to Choosing a Killer Title For Your Blog”
Can you tell why this is a wrong choice of words? Obviously, none of the first 7 words of this title will ever be used as a keyword when a person is searching for information on this topic.
Good keyword rich title example:
“How to Choose a Blog Title – 3 Secrets to Help You Choose the Best Title for Your Blog”
Excellent keyword rich title example:
“Blog Titles – How to Choose a Blog Title Using 3 Little Known Secrets. Is that Boring or What?
So how do I know the difference between these titles?
Tip 3. Use Google Keyword Tool to See The Global Monthly Searches Of The First 3-6 Words of Your Title
In the second example listed above, “how to choose a blog title” has 36 Global Monthly searches (as per Google KW Tool), whereas in the example of an excellent title, “blog titles” has 6,600 searches.
“the top 3 secrets to” has no searches. What you also will see, if you do the Google Keyword study, is that Google suggests other keywords, such as “best network marketing companies”. This means that by starting your headline with a phrase like “The top 3 Secrets…” you are telling Google to place your article in an area totally unrelated to your topic.
Note: I dare not do a keyword search on “the top 3 secrets to choosing a killer…” because the FBI may be at my door!
What is the point of using “Is that Boring or What?” at the end of the headline?
Well, this last bit at the title’s end has no global monthly searches, so why do I use it? We said that negative words attract more direct traffic. I use it at the end of the title where it has a smaller SEO impact and the reason is to attract eyeballs coming from direct visits. This is the bit of the title that enticed you to read this post if you came to this post following a link from another blog.
Why is the last title more effective?
Because it does not waste the first 3-6 words of the title with meaningless words like “the“, “top”, or the number “3“, or unrelated words like “secrets“, “choosing”, or ”killers” and gets right to the important words that might be found when someone is using a search engine to research a topic related to your article.
Got the point? Now try it for yourself.