How To Write a Post Title That Will Get Search Traffic
If you’re gunning for search traffic, then the post title holds the most weight!
I can’t say that I read a lot of blogs daily. In fact, I am really not much of a reader at all. I am not patient and reading makes me anxious.
Anyway, when I do take a brief moment to read other blogs, often I see things that should have been done differently. One of the most common mistakes I see bloggers make is in how they title their post.
Usually what i see is a really long title with about ten words. This is NOT good if your goal is to get search traffic. On the flip side, it’s fine if your blog is catering to regular readers and if you have little concern about increasing readers direct from google and other search engines.
To be honest, in most cases when I am gunning for search traffic, it’s really because I want money. Search traffic equals money. Regular reader traffic doesn’t. This is more true if you’re running a blog with Google Adsense on it.
The best way to title a blog post is to use the exact phrase you’d want people to search for to find your post. The second part to that is your content. Your post content needs to compliment your post title.
Complimenting your post title with your post content means to use the exact phrase of your title in your content. Also, using bits and pieces of your post title is a must as well. The third part is to be careful not to use words that can potentially conflict with the ads you are trying to generate.
The forth part, which is something people screw up all the time as well, is abusing the keyword phrase. If you use the keyword phrase too often, Google and other search engines will catch on that you’re stuffing keywords and adjust your ranking. The best advice I can offer is to be natural with your writing, but also be conscious of opportunities where you can throw a keyword in here and there.
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14 comments
I usually think of including real life search phrases when titling my post. For instance, many people search starting with “How to…”. So title your post thus to get all the curious minded searchers. The number game also plays the trick, such as, “10 tips to…”, “5 killer strategies”, etc. I usually use the combination of both to get search traffic heading my way.
HI garry, totally agree with this post, i am amazed with the “eyeexamcoupons.com” with the searched keyword eye exam coupons from adwords tool, this is an exact keyword with a number of search volume with limited competition. People will easily reach your site from SE with this exact keyword on your domain, title, and little of keyword from the content,
Thanks for sharing those insights. They were very interesting and will be very useful for me. I will surely check my blogs and make sure I got it right.
I can vouch for using a keyword “too often” in a post penalty. I had a fairly new site optimized a little too well and it got pushed right off the serp’s in Google. After a little editing and less usage of the keyword my site was back on top.
Sad but true. I recently had a blog that ranked on the first page of google. I tried to move up even higher on the page by writing a page and really used the keyword…
Suffice to say the blog rank dropped to the 3rd page of a google search.
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Very good point Gary.
I like to do a little keyword research before posting to my blog.
Use the keywords in you title and sparingly in your article. I like to just write like I would talk. Google is real good at taking a theme of a website into consideration even without extra keyword usage.
Later
So Garry, if you want traffic from people searching for “make money online” then that is all you would put in your title?
/Mikael
HI Garry, thanks for the information! I tried to follow what you mentioned in this post and have what i expected people to search to be on the topic, but i did a search in adword tool this phrase doesnt have enough data in the monthly searches, i am doubt if this phrase really searched by people through SE. Can you please advice on this?
Great post Garry –
Not only can you lose search traffic, and ranking by overuse of a term, you can quickly lose the interest of the reader. Nothing is more annoying than reading a blog in which the author is clearly more interested in rankings, than in producing quality content.
Matt
You are right about attractive titles. There are many articles around discussing the same themes, and since we have limited time in a day for reading, the difference in getting people’s interest are the titles.
Using All-In-One SEO plug-in is also a great way to use the post title to gain more traffic.
You are right up to a point. The title of any blog post is important but I find that often when going for one search phrase, the post ranks well fo another
So I tend to write naturally now. And it still pulls in search engine traffic.
My post title is usually the exact keywords that I am targeting and my content always is specific to the title. Sometimes I tended to ramble and this did not rank as well as when my post are targeted.
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