Search Engine Friendly Blog Titles

28 Nov 2007 at 21:20 by Joshua J. Steimle

Do you blog for business? Heck, that doesn't even matter. Do you want people to visit your blog, whether it's for business or it's personal? Then here's a simple tip that might seem obvious, but which the majority of bloggers ignore. Use keywords to title your blog posts. Here's how...

Use the Google Keyword Tool. Type in a few keywords relevant to whatever topic it is you're going to blog about. See which keywords come up, sort them by average search volume, and then work those keywords into the title of your blog post. You want an example? Here you go.

I was about to write a post on my entrepreneurship / business blog about how I regret having used a bank loan five years ago to fund my business. Now if I were going to create a title without thinking of keywords I probably would have tried to think of something clever, like "Bad Debt? Or Debt Bad?" or "You Can Take Your Debt And Shove It" or something. I'm writing this post because I want people who are in the same situation I was, young entrepreneurs with boundless optimism, to think twice before they go and get a $100K loan. And of course I'd like as many people as possible to read it. But they can't read it if they can't find it, right? So what are people searching for?

With a little poking around I figured out that people don't search for "bad debt" when they're thinking of applying for an SBA loan. They're usually searching for things like "small business loans" or "startup loans" or "SBA loans" or some other phrase with the word "loan" in it. So instead, I titled my post Small Business Loans for Startups vs. Bootstrapping. You see, the "vs." makes it interesting, because it implies conflict. But the "small business loans" and "startup" and "bootstrapping" ensure that; 1) the blog post will come up in search engines for more searches by my target audience, and 2) that people will have a better idea of what the post is about. Everybody wins, right? Wrong!!! I'm just kidding, everybody really does win.

And do you think I used the same technique to create the title for this blog post? You betcha.

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