How To Write Keyword Optimized Blog Post Titles

Blogging requires you to be knowledgeable about a whole spectrum of different subjects in order to be successful.  You need to know all about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Social media marketing, article structure, WordPress, web design, affiliate marketing, etc. as well as the actual subject that you are blogging about.

You don’t need to be an “expert” at all of these things, but it helps to know a little about everything in order to grow your site.

Someone recently asked me – “Of all the things bloggers need to learn about, what would you say is THE most important?”

That is a very good question, one in which I think many new (and existing) bloggers think about themselves.

Personally, there is only one answer – SEO.

I have said countless times here on this website that SEO is incredibly important to learn about.  By understanding how the search engines work and present information to people, you can get more traffic by simply crafting your posts in a smarter way.

Now, SEO is in itself is a pretty large subject to talk about (one that I talk about in more depth here), so, again, if I had to pick just one area to focus on it would be blog post titles and how to properly optimise them.

Why Blog Post Titles?

Bloggers put a lot of effort into what they write about on a consistent basis.  That said, all that effort can go to waste if they don’t have a good blog post title.

Your post title is by far the most important aspect of each individual post as that is what people click on to read.

Take a moment to think about all the different places that people see your blog post title.  They will see it;

• On your blog page next to a short description of your post,
• In your sidebar (relevant posts),
• Beneath other articles (relevant posts),
• On your newsletter,
• On the search engines,
• On social media when sharing your content (Tweet, G+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• …and so on.

Why Are Blog Post Titles So Important?

Your blog post title needs to convey 4 key pieces of information;

1. Be relatively short,
2. Make sense,
3. Entice people to click and read more,
4. Include relevant keywords/keyphrases that you want the post to rank for.

Writing a good blog post title is a lot harder than you may think as it is not always as easy to tick off all of these 4 points.

You should however always strive to do so as it can make a huge difference to the amount of traffic you can get.

The first place to start should always be to look at which keywords/keyphrases that you want the post to rank for.

You should have done this with the post itself anyway (try to get into the habit of doing that if you don’t already), in which case you have a good idea which specific words/phrases you want to include in your title.

How To Write Keyword Optimized Blog Post Titles

In order to do this properly we will need to take a look at the incredibly useful ‘Google Keyword Planner’ tool.

I have actually written a more in-depth guide to using this tool, so feel free to check out my ‘Getting Started With Google Keyword Planner’guide when you have finished reading this.

Often, many bloggers make the mistake of only using one keyword/keyphrase for each of their posts.  There is little to no chance of ranking for only one word/phrase per post, which is why it is good to use a handful (where possible).

You also want, when you can, to use keywords/phrases together to form, what I like to call, “super keyphrases”.  Let’s take a look at a couple of examples;

Example 1

Let’s say that I wanted to write a post about gardening, or to be more specific, a post about growing your own vegetables.

From doing some research using the keyword planner tool I can see that the words/phrases that are most relevant would be; growing your own food, grow your own vegetables, grow your own (veg name), how to grow, tips to grow, gardening tips, etc.

I could therefore use a title as follows that includes 2 of the keyphrases that I have found;

5 Tips To Grow Your Own Vegetables

5 Tips To Grow

5 Tips To Grow Your Own Vegetables

Example 2

Let’s take it a step further and try to include another.

Remember though, it needs to still make sense to the reader.  Let’s also try to be a bit more specific by focusing on one particular vegetable.

Top 10 Gardening Tips To Grow Your Own Tomatoes

Top 10 Gardening Tips

Top 10 Gardening Tips To Grow

Top 10 Gardening Tips To Grow Your Own Tomatoes

The two examples above still make perfect sense to the browsing reader, they don’t appear “spammy” by stuffing in keywords so that it doesn’t make sense and, more importantly, they have the chance to rank for multiple web searches.

This method can’t (unfortunately) guarantee good rankings for every post you publish, but I find that it certainly helps.

This is what I try to do with my posts and it seems to work on the whole.  Some are more successful that others, but that tends to be more down to Google.

Of course, you still need to make sure you use your chosen keywords and keyphrases throughout your actual post (subtitles, tags, meta descriptions, ALT tags, etc.).

The point is that you can include a lot more in a natural looking way that you might have thought.

So next time you come to write your blog post title, take a few minutes to think about what words/phrases you want to rank for and see if you can fit in some additional ones into the title itself.

Your Turn:

How do you come up with your blog post titles? 

Do you optimize yours?  We want to hear from you so please leave us a comment below.