Are your post titles optimized for search engines?
If you’re like most bloggers, you probably think search engine optimization is a major ordeal … full of pain and misery … kinda like pulling teeth. However, in reality, it’s much more along the lines of making sure you brush your teeth twice a day. Staying on top of the SEO of your blog will prevent you the pain and miser of having to go through every page you’ve published and optimize it individually once you decide it’s time to optimize your blog for search engines.
As mentioned, I’m going to be covering search engine optimization regularly here at Fuel Your Blogging, because the web is far too competitive for bloggers to ignore it.
I’d like to start it all off with another installment to our Feedback Friday series. The question I’m asking this week is as follows:
Are your post titles optimized for search engines?
If you’d like me to check out your blog, go ahead and share a link to your blog in the comments below. Tell me a little about your blog and why you want feedback … it’s not mandatory, but it just helps keep the conversation interactive and fun!
Looking forward to taking a look and providing you some free feedback. Remember, this is stuff professional SEO providers would charge you for, so don’t pass it up.
Image credit: pau.artigas
Thanks for the offer – StealingFaith is a humor blog devoted to the topics of relationships, parenting, and family (and anything else about the human condition too bizarre to pass up without mention!). I started it a year ago and it’s gotten about 20,000 hits.. but I’d love for it to grow and have the potential to earn income.
Thanks for your feedback!
Hey JJ!
Congrats on attracting such an awesome amount of traffic in such a short period of time … you probably have a few tips we can all learn from ;) ( http://goo.gl/5Zpfc )
Anyway, looks like you’re creating some really awesome content. One thing I think may help is if you focused on creating more titles like “How To Get Married In Six Months Or Less.” There’s a balance between creating an interesting title and creating a compelling title. In terms of SEO, I think it’s best to focus on making it compelling, because it will likely include the words people are searching the web for naturally. So while “Sickly Grenade” may be an interesting title, it’s my guess it isn’t bringing in much traffic from the search engines, because it isn’t very descrive.
Again, there’s a balance to walk … and it’s crucial not to sacrifice your style or voice just to gain more traffic.
Hope this helps JJ! Keep up the awesome sauce!
@christophrrice
Would love to know!
Hey Luke!
You have a rather difficult challenge here in terms of title seo, because it seems your blog is more of a community hangout, where you feature a picture of the day and other awesome content.
One thing I might try is creating posts that highlight several pictures of the same theme or subject, and create a list post where I could optimize the title a bit more while maintaining the creativity of each photograph title. I’m guessing you don’t get that much traffic from the search engines for your post, “Snow Cat,” for example … not only because the words “snow cat” are associated with tractor equipment rentals, but also because while the title of the photograph may be creative, it’s not very compelling as a blog post title. So instead of publishing a picture of the day, what if you published a series of pictures of the day … all related to a single subject, such as snow cats or tigers and snow, and then create a title along the lines of “10 stunning pictures of tigers in the snow.” “tigers in the snow” alone yields 110 searches a month, which may not seem like much at first, but then multiply that by 83 pages of posts and you may be looking at a lot more traffic … all depending on your ranking.
Hope this helped. Let me know if you have questions, mate!
@ChristophrRice
Good idea for a post, but i would like to see something on, how to optimize your page titles for SEO. It is so important that blogs are optimized. You have a good topic here, but how about a follow up! Maybe Keyword One, Keyword Two ?
I’m definitely going to be exploring more of the seo realm here at FUEL continuing forward. You’ll be able to find them in the SEO sub-category of GO FURTHER … http://www.fuelyourblogging.com/category/go-further/seo-go-further/
What do you mean keyword one, keyword two?
My blog is all about nutrition and fitness. I do a lot of research to supplement it, unlike plenty of people who go off of a “I hear this so it must be right,” basis.
Hey Melissa, looks like you’re doing a great job with your titles. Tumblr’s always a bit tricky, as you’ve got all sorts of types of posts, but from what I could tell from the text posts, it’s looking good!
The key is to use the language your community is using, so that a person searching Google for something will naturally find your content. Titles like “SHOULD I HIT THE GYM EVEN THOUGH I’M NOT FEELING WELL?” and “THE TOP 5 GERMIEST PLACES YOU WOULDN’T EXPECT” are both great because they’re compelling to visitors. However, after a quick bit of research I’m guessing you’re not gaining much traffic to these posts from the engines. You can do a little keyword research yourself before publishing your post, and discover what people are looking for in Google and Bing. I found that there were 28 searches for “gym while sick” … 1,900 search for “working out while sick” … and 1,00 for “exercising while sick” … so with that info in mind, you could have tweaked the title a bit to try and position your content in the search engine index so people searching for those terms could have found your post.
Again, it’s a balance you need to walk when publishing because you don’t want to sacrifice your awesome titles just to try and align your content in search engines. But with some practice and time, you’ll be able to gain more traffic and attract dedicated readers.
Cheers, Melissa!
@ChristophrRice
I always works for the title before writing article. because a proper title optimization can attract more loyal readers to your blog… I always do the optimization for both title and url..
I think brian over at copyblogger talks a lot about defining your title before you start writing … not so much for seo, but so you have a clear mindset and goal with the article.
In terms of seo, i don’t think it matters whether you do it before or after. While it may be a good way to research keywords you want to target and then create content around them, you could be sacrificing the quality and organic voice of your writing. At the same time, it’s good to have an idea of what your readers are searching for.
url optimization is a-whole-nother story, which relates, but needs it’s own post for sure. Thanks for reading and continuing the conversation, Kulwant!
My blog is for my company, Splashtop, a top-selling remote desktop app.
Please check out our blog: http://www.splashtop.com/blog
I’d love to feedback because my company is starting to implement SEO strategy and this will be valuable info for us.
Hey Joanne! Thanks for jumping on … sorry i’m late with the response.
There’s one thing I see that could use some tweaking, but overall you guys are doing a good job. The headings of your posts are a bit wordy, but compelling and positive for your brand none-the-less, however, what sticks out as needing improvement is the actual title you’ve created for the article.
The heading “5 Ways to Wow Your Audience by Presenting with an iPad” is awesome, but the post title is as follows:
“Splashtop Inc. – blog – 5 Ways to Wow Your Audience by Presenting with an iPad”
This places your keywords further away from the front of your title, which tells search engines it may not be as crucial as “Splashtop Inc” and “blog.” One way to tweak this is to bump the brand of your company to the tail end of your title.
“5 Ways to Wow Your Audience by Presenting with an iPad | Splashtop Inc.”
Just an idea. Hope all is well!
My blog is just another technology blog with an emphasis on Microsoft platform. I just want to make a difference by giving my readers exactly what they want .. Would love your opinion about this.
Your titles look great Usman!
The only thing you can do from this point is target popular keywords and make tweaks where you see fit due to performance of your titles and the search engines.
Nice!
Would love to take advantage of your offer to assess my website’s blog.
My blog is targeted at business owners who do their own web admin and/or webmaster work. It contains information for novice and not-so-novice people who want to build, maintain and/or optimize their own websites and to build their online presence.
My reason for wanting feedback is that my traffic levels are very low. At the same time, though, my page ranking has increased from 2 to 4.
Hey Scott,
Your titles look solid, and a a pagerank 4 is awesome! I think the best course of action you can take at this point is to conduct keyword research and write content that targets the less competitive keywords … even if there are only 200 people searching for “so and so database maintenance,” that’s 2,400 potential annual visits to JUST ONE of your posts … multiply that by 30 and you’re looking at 72,000 annual visits just from targeting less competitive keywords.
Target those more competitive keywords as well … you’ll begin ranking better for those keywords once your pagerank increases … and that will increase as more people link it up :) (guest posts are always good ways to build links and establish authority http://www.fuelyourblogging.com/contribute/)
In addition, jump onto stumble upon and begin adding your pages. Use the su.pr url shortener service of theirs and you’ll see an increase in traffic in minutes. I started sharing links with su.pr last night at 3am and already attracted 100+ unique visitors, brining my pageview count up toward 600.
Try other services like this … including digg and delicious. Let us know how ya do!
Christopher,
Very much appreciate your feedback and your time! Implementing your suggestions is next – I liked/understood them all, including the guest blogging :)
My blog, http://www.gettingthroughtheday.com is about practical tips to help women get through their day in parenting, homemaking, cooking, organization, etc. I would love to hear any of your thoughts on SEO optimization on my titles and other ways to optimize my blog content. Thank you.
Thanks for contributing, Stacey!
Looks like your titles share the same problem as Joanne’s post titles … they’re backwards. In terms of SEO, it’s best to keep the branding second to the keyword focus so search engines can quickly figure out what the title of your content is all about.
Check it out:
Your titles appear along the lines of “Getting Through the Day: Laundry Trials Part 2″, which puts an emphasis on the brand of your blog instead of the post title.
Simple improvement:
Instead of placing the title of your blog in front of the title of your post, consider switching them.
“Laundry Trials Part 2 | Getting Through the Day”
This may help your positing within the search engines a bit, as well as increase clicks from potential readers.
Good luck!!
Hello Christopher,
Thanks for such great initiative. I’d love to get your thoughts about my posts’ titles. My blog has been running for about a year now; it’s about my travels and photos: http://www.nomadbiba.com/. Saludos!
Hey. I’ve had my fashion blog now for a couple of years. Year one was fantastic but I seem to have stopped growing. Took a blogging break last year and struggling to get back to where i was. Though I’ve made a few mistakes recently by tweaking and I should have left alone….i changed my permalinks for prettier ones…used a blog to do the 301 directs but a few days later i noticed my categories were returning 404’s. Removed the plugin and reverted my permalinks back to the originals. Since changing them back i’ve noticed that any posts written in 2012 have now dropped liked stones in the serps and new posts created in the last few days just aren’t showing up either. So any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated. I did at one stage have around 14000 views per month i’m down to around 5k.
Thanks for this http:// guideyourkids.blogspot.com is a blog about raising successful kids and good parenting, i will love to have good tariffs on this blog site.
I just want my blog to perform its best in the seo side dont know if my titles are up to standard but would like to know if it is optimized for its full potential it is a blogging site just writing about anything http://www.bloglifejournal.com Thanks
What a kind offer! I don’t know if this is still an active offer but I am just setting up. Complete newbie and would love you to take a look at the beginnings of my blog!
http://www.fillingyourwell.com
Any and all comments would be helpful.
Hi,
I share this blog with a friend, we’ve started since 2011 when we had no idea about SEO, so now we are trying to optimize it.It’s sad that we barely get 200 daily hits :( . In the past (until a week ago) we had no definite topic, no main keyword, no nothing, so now we’ve deleted a lot of our posts and we are trying to optimize the remaining and future post on our keywords of choice.
1. How can you diversify keywords in your blog title and still rank high on your main keywords?
2. Does adding the main keyword in all title posts affect our google ranking? My intuition tells me that using the same keyword is definitely not ok, but hey…I am barely beginning on the SEO thingy…
Your help and feedback would be very much appreciated.