Blogging For Business Tip #8

How do you write a perfect blog title?

You can spend hours creating the perfect post. You can write, edit, and edit some more. No matter what you have to say in your post, if your title doesn’t capture attention, no one will ever read it.

A blog title is important because:

It’s the first thing people see - they make a split decision to keep reading or not.
Your title becomes your long tail - will it help find you traffic in Google and other search engines?
Your title feeds into your title tags, and can also help you gain traffic in the search engines.
It sets up your story. It’s what people see if you are using RSS to announce your information in other places.

Even though it has a lot of influence within the search engines, the search engines shouldn’tbe your top concern.

Your readers are your top concern.

If you’ve ever been to a blog where all post titles are geared solely for search engine rankings, you know how fast you can back out of a site. There’s nothing like seeing 100 posts, all with the title "My Key Word - 1", "My Key Word - 2", "My Key Word - 3", etc.

Understand your readers. What do they want to learn, read about, and understand better?

Define your topics. If your blogging about photography, they want to see titles that give them more information about what they love. "The Fate Of Wedding Photography" was hugely successful on my photography blog because it captures the attention of my readers.

Be clear - but have fun too. What made "The Fate Of Wedding Photography" so much fun was it played on emotions. A lot of businesses are in trouble in this economy. Readers can clearly see what the post is about - wedding photography - and yet its asking a question that’s on a lot of studio owners’ minds. Of course they want to read to find out what my take is on the whole industry.

Be original. Your blog is your voice. It has your personality. People come to it because they like what you have to say. So keep saying it. The more you say it, the more they’ll read.

photo source mrceviz