How to Write Kickass Blog Post Titles - Web 2.0 - Blogs
Titles are the most important part of a blog post. A posts title is the first thing that a person notices. It is also the first thing that a person who comes across your blog post in a social bookmarking site or Twitter or in the Search Engine Results sees.
So it is very important to have a killer blog title to catch the persons attention and make him read the full post. We really do not want our visitor to just look at our posts title find it uninteresting and just ignore our post. Do we?How will a good title for our Blog Posts Help?
Many of you may ask the above question, how will having a good title help? After all they are only few words arent they?
Actually yes, they are a few words which may appear insignificant to you since you maybe writing a 1000 word post but rather these words are very very significant.
I would in fact say that the few words that you write in your posts titles are the most important words of your whole Post. Why? Simply because for most of your readers the decision to read or not to the read the rest of the blog post resides on these few words.
You may note the fact that a blog posts title is the first thing that appears in search engines, social bookmarking sites, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds so this are the first thing that a reader reads. As we all know that First Impression is the Last Impression and if your Posts title is not Magnetic enough then the reader will not bother to read the rest of the post.
Thus the main reason behind having a killer/kickass blog title is To Capture the readers attention and compel him to read the post.
Also having a good blog post title enriched with keywords can help you get a better search result ranking for your long tail keywords in search engines since nowadays the search engines give more priority to the title tag then any other tags.
How to Make Killer Post Titles?
Ok! I think now you have understood why to have a kickass post title. Now lets discuss the main part : How to Write a Killer Post Title?
1) Be Descriptive and Direct:
This is the simplest trick of them all. Be Descriptive and direct about what you have written. Nobody will come to read your post if you have not properly described What topic you have written about in the title. For example, If you have written about a trick to earn 10$ from a site and you give a title Learn How to Earn a Lot of Money from ZZZZ site. The reader will feel deceived and will never come back to your site. Just write it Direct Learn How to Earn 10$ from ZZZZ site. If the reader is interested he/she will read it. If not, you will still save yourself from making a negative impact on someone.
2) Keep it Short
Yes, Keep your title short. Why?
Search Engines Like Google only display 64 character (including spaces) in their search results so If you have a long title like How to make a lot of Extra Money from Freelancing Sites by Writing Articles | Netchunks then only half of it will be displayed. Some what like How to make a lot Extra Money From Freelancing Site By.. By! By What? People will not understand your title and thus will not read the rest of the article .People tend to get attracted to a shorter title rather than a lengthy boring title (Actually they may think, If the title is so long and boring, How lengthy and boring the article maybe!!)Keep it short so that it can be easily shared in Social media sites like Twitter and Identi.ca. Since this sites have only a 140 characters limit, you should actually keep it as short as possible so that it can be retweeed or re-shared3) Use Powerful and Bold Words
Not every word can evoke the same feeling from a reader. Sometimes some words can evoke more powerful or intense emotions in your readers. Inclusion of these kind of words in the blog title can urge your reader to read the full post
These words are also called trigger words because these words trigger an emotion in a readers mind. Some examples of trigger words are:
KillerThrillingAmazingStunningSecretsFreeThere are many more and it is hard to list them down. You can find some more of these Trigger Words at CopyBlogger.
By using these power words, you can explain what you mean to show in the post more powerfully to the people.
4) Communicate Benefits
To make people read the post, you will have to show them what they will get back after reading it. This can be aptly done by showing the benefits in the title. For this you have understand what are the needs of the people you are targeting. Example, A title stating How to Write an Ebook may sound exciting to people who want to know about writing ebooks and he may read it. But it will not evoke responses from all people, some may ignore it since they may not be interested in it. The magic works only on people you are targeting, i.e. in this case, people wanting to write ebooks.
5) Ask Questions
Ok! This is a great way of sparking great debates and discussions. When you use Questions as the title of the post, most readers already think of the answers in their mind and then read the post to confirm it if they were right. If they were right, then it validates their own knowledge and if they were wrong then they still will comment and will try to explain to you in details why YOU ARE wrong and will try to prove that you are the greatest moron. Thus it will spark of a debate and discussion. By asking question you will pull the reader to comment on your post.
7) Personalize the Title
It will certainly help if you can personalize the title and create titles which make people feel that they are somehow connected with the post and the post has been written for them to read. For Example, 10 Ways to Make Your Blog Better, this will certainly appeal to the mind of the people since you are using the word Your which people will find is directed towards each of them
Also another way of personalizing a title is by writing about yourself. Share some personal stories within the title. For e.g Why My Links are not Do Follow? or How I became a Successful Blogger Overnight.
8 ) Create Controversies
If Hollywood and Bollywood celebrities can create controversies for the publicity of their film then why cant you too. Yes! People are interested a lot in controversies and the controversy Magic may work for popularizing your blog post too. You should sometimes write controversial headlines for your articles but be sure that you have enough to back it up through your Blog Post contents and comments. Also the post must reflect the title and not something else. You must be also be ready to answer the different types of comments and questions that you will be getting from people in your post.
9) Use Creativity
You will need to make all your dead brain cells alive again so that you can come up with a very creative title such that it can make more and more people read the post. You must use your imagination and your creativity to come up with effective headlines for your articles.
10) Make Claims and Promises
Many times a title in which you have made a lot of claims and promises can help you attract a lot of people. This type of claims and promises will make even people without a real interest in your topic to read the post.
But you should be highly cautious while writing these kind of posts.Do not try to make any false claims. Be truthful, otherwise if you cannot back your claims with your post content then you will have a bad image among your readers.
11) Avoid Using Very Tough Words
Do not use very very tough jargon that only you can understand. You should go with the policy K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple and Sweet). Although it is not that you have to use very simple words, you can use some creative words but do not be extra creative using words that only very highly intellectual people can understand.
For E.g: If your title is How to Increase your noesis by reading Ebooks Nobody will understand it.
(Damn! noesis mean knowledge, now which sane person will understand that word means knowledge.)
12) Use Lists:
Lists posts are extremely attractive to lot of readers that is why we can see that in social media sites like Digg, Delicious etc most of the popular posts are list posts. Check out these examples: 100 Best WordPress Themes or 25 Best Books For WordPress Bloggers These also make excellent link bait for others bloggers to link to and tweet about.
13) Use Keywords
The usage of keywords in the post title is very important from a Search Engine Optimization point of view. All of us want our post to rank high for the particular topic or keyword we have targeted. Thus it is essential to add the keyword in the title to get a better rank in Search Engine Results. Also I have mentioned it before too, Google nowadays takes title tag as an important factor when ranking pages. So if your title tag is optimized with keywords you will certainly rank in the top results of Google and gain a good traffic from long tail keywords.
Choosing of the keyword that you are going to target is also very important since many keyword may not go along with the post title. You have to come up with a keyword that gels inside the title.
Also some times, many people tend to scan posts in their RSS readers for keywords they are interested in For e.g. Google, iPhone etc. Thus if you have added keyword like iPhone in the post title and they come across the post they are most certainly to read it.
A good tip when adding keywords to title is to add it more to the front then to the last as it has better effect on your SERPs.
Epilogue
I hope you got a brief idea of how to write an attractive and magnetic post title. Here are some other small points that are really not that important but you may still want to consider:
Write your Posts Title After writing the post: It is a good idea in the sense you have already written the full post and know about what topic you have written. But in many situations this method may not work.
Avoid Using Period In the Posts Title: It really is impromptu to see periods in post title
I would recommend that you should combine SEO and Creativity 50-50 while coming up with a post title so that it gives you good result in the search engines as well as attracts more readers.
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