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Think of Your Headlines Like Backlinks

Posted on June 19th in Ideas — 7 Comments so far. Got something to say?

Just a quick tip here, but something few stop to think about.

On a blog, the headlines appear on the front page, or the archives, or where ever they may be displayed, linking to the post. If you want to get the maximum value out of your site in terms of organic traffic, think of SEO when writing your headlines. Your headlines will carry a good weight for search engines, because they should be in <h1>’s. One post from the past kind of touched on this before: Headlines: Clever, Concise or SEO?

Also, for newer readers, you might want to check out the SEO Tag Archives. Might be some good stuff in there.

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Angie
June 20th, 2007 at 5:22 AM

Does it make any difference if you use a plugin to alter the page title vs. the actual name of your post. I like clever post titels, but I do understand that from a SEO point of view that may not be the best path. I installed a plugin to work with title tags, but have not started fiddling with it yet.
Andy
June 20th, 2007 at 7:47 AM

I always try and do this, although of course it’s quite hard sometimes to know what will rank best SEO wise, but definitely a good practice.
Connor Wilson
June 20th, 2007 at 10:08 AM

Angie, it will make a little bit of a difference. I have my titles set up here so when viewing a post the entire is only the headline, no “at Connor Wilson” or anything. I have my code in the linked post on clever, concise and SEO titles.

As long as you have your post titles in <h1>’s (changing this may require some CSS tweaks and the post title in the in single.php, then you should be good. I also use <h2> for subheadings in posts.
L3ggy
June 20th, 2007 at 2:43 PM

I use for the main header of my blog. It’s better there, h2’s for titles and h3’s (cleverly put) for post specs like time it was posted etc.
Connor Wilson
June 20th, 2007 at 2:56 PM

That’s actually a pretty bad approach in terms of hierarchy, Henry.

http://www.pearsonified.com/2007/04/definitive-guide-to-semantic-markup.php
Timous
March 18th, 2008 at 2:45 PM

Headers are an important part of SEO.
Marketing
June 1st, 2008 at 6:14 AM

I fully agree with you on this one, sometimes though its so difficult to ensure a catchy headline and still do the SEO. Actually often I dont even bother with the SEO. Will also make sure that the H1 is done correctly.