Blog Post Titles: Clever, Concise or SEO?
The titles of your blog entries are very important. You can play with them in many ways, but there are three main types.
- Clever, a joke or play on words to get a laugh or a snicker.
- Concise, to clearly describe what is ahead.
- SEO, to purposely try and get SERPs for the specific terms.
When you write an entry, you should think of what it’s future is, and what you want it to do.
Clever Titles
You should try to get some of these going when your post has no real plan. It’s just a normal post, like all the other ones, so try and liven it up a little. Though they seem far and few between here, I throw in the odd clever post title if I feel it necessary. So examples from the past are:
Sure, you may not laugh but they are more clever than usual 
Concise Titles
The most common, by far I would think. This is just when you write your title so it will accurately portray the content of the article. You’ll find most blogs will do this, and when you find a bookmarking site like Digg or del.icio.us, the stories with the more concise titles will be more popular? The reason for this is because the reader usually does not want to read a whole post, but skim it instead. The first thing they’ll see is the title, and if they read it and are interested in the content, then they are more likely to read it than skim through.
Titles for SEO
Making your titles built for search engines can help traffic, but may look out of place or throw your readers off. Say you think you could get a good SERP for the term “widgets and gadgets” so you write a post named just that. If your site is coded properly, has been optimized at least a little for search engines, then traffic should come through. The best way to do this is to set up your page <title>’s the way I have them here. Just have either the name of the blog, or the title of what they’re reading.
If you’re a WordPress user, you can use this code to setup your titles like this. Open up header.php in your admin panel, FTP or whatever, and change whatever your title tags are now to this:
<title>
<?php wp_title('');
if (function_exists('is_tag') and is_tag()) { ?>Tag Archive for <?php echo $tag; }
if (is_archive()) { ?> archive<?php }
elseif (is_search()) { ?> Search for <?php echo $s; }
if ( !(is_404()) and (is_search()) or (is_single()) or (is_page()) or (function_exists('is_tag') and is_tag()) or (is_archive()) ) { /**/ }
if(is_home()) { bloginfo('name'); } ?></title>
Simple, yet it can do wonders for your SE traffic.
Leave a comment
Josh Buckley
April 16th, 2007 at 9:24 AM
Nice post, very informative. I personally like to have a clever title now and then. But, for my project update posts, i try to keep the titles simple.
The title SEO’ing definately helps.
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