Rank Highly with a Blog Post Title in Search Engines

First published on the Ladies Who Launch Blog

EXTRA! EXTRA! BLOG POST TITLES MUST BE SEO JUICY!!

Citizen journalists and industry experts who hope to monetize their blogs have a new challenge as writers/editors with regards to blog post titles. In the old days of print journalism, copywriters worried about how many characters (spaces included) would fit into a space for a great headline that would sell papers and keep readers. Headlines were clever ink prints on a page. On the Internet, however, they are links, cannot be touched with anything but a mouse, and they can make or break your popularity in the search engines. Why? Search engines love them, and people love them. Search engines can reward a blog post title with high rankings, and a person needs to click it to contribute to the traffic to your website or blog.

First of all: What is the blog post title and where do you find it? Read about the title tag with pictures here first.

In the Search Engine Age, however, writers have at least two new challenges:

1. Get the article to even rank highly in search engines, aka being #1 on Google or at least on the first page of search results. Search engines place a lot of ranking value on the page title. On a website, you can usually easily set your page title. On a blog, usually your blog post title doubles as the page title. While considering your blog post as a potential high ranking web page, the search engines pay close attention to what words you use in your blog post title. In the case of this blog post, it is titled: "Rank Highly with a Blog Post Title in Search Engines"

Example: Let's say you article is all about "essie nail polish" and how their new colors are based on candy. If your blog post title is: "Yummy Nails" but the content in that blog post is all about how essie nail polish was inspired by candy, and how your nails can look like pastel pieces of rock candy, then you have just shot yourself in the foot for ranking for the following words: essie, nail polish, candy, color. None of them are in your blog post title, as cute as it is. The search engines would most likely give you higher rankings with "Essie's New Rock Candy Color Nail Polish." You can get more clever with it, but the goal is to at least have essie and nail polish and color in your post title, because those terms may be what people are searching for.

How do you know what keywords people are searching for? You use Yahoo's free tool, Overture, or you pay for the keyword research tool Keyword Discovery. Everyone uses Overture, so it can be slow at times. But otherwise gives reliable results.

2. Grab the reader as they scan the list of blue titles in search engines to see which ones they want to click. Your titles need to be quick, short and to the point. This can be tough, if you're trying to get keywords in there. Sometimes you may need to take the SEO hit if you want your feed readers to click, rather than a search engine ranking. Read this to see how your ranking title looks in a search engine.

The point is: be cute in your blog post titles, but make sure your keywords are in there!! You may need to curb your creativity a little. :)

How Will Google Find My Blog?

Google will definitely find your blog when another website links to you. Yahoo, Google, MSN and other search engines work in simular ways. A search engine like Google will find your blog and rate it according to how many links point to it, as well as relevant content within its pages. Therefore, in theory, you don't need to submit your blog to a search engine directory (and you should never pay one to have your blog included - search engines do not work that way, Google doesn't at least). But it doesn't hurt and is painless.

When you're blog is in a place you're satisfied with, I recomend you submit it to two places: straight to Google and to the human edited directory, dmoz. If you submit your blog to dmoz, make sure you select the right category (there's lots of them). Google may include your blog in future spiders (it's not 100%, but is likely), and a person at dmoz will one day come over and check your blog and add it if he/she likes to that directory. Dmoz does give blog and website information to Google, Yahoo and others, so you may as well submit. I'm no expert on dmoz, I just know it is recomended by bloggers to submit to it.

Because you've selected in your settings to have each post be a page, each post is qualified to come up in a search engine result for whatever you wrote about, be it "seychelles wedges" or "kadorables t-shirts." So when you're writing each post, think about what search terms a user might type into Google's search box (or another search engine) when looking for something specific. Yahoo has a great tool you can use called Overture. This was built for websites who want pay-per-click advertising on their sites. It measures what search terms are being plugged into Yahoo every month. So Overture is a free and easy to use tool to check if a phrase is being searched in search engines. Your blog has a good chance of showing up in these search results if you write your posts tightly around a phrase.

But, the bottom line is, you will rank higher in search results if you 1. have links poinint to your blog or specific posts on your blog and 2. 'optimized content' is written tightly into your posts - for those posts you want to rank for (or be found for), that is.

May the search engines be with you!