Choosing a Post Title

Choosing a good title: choosing the title of your posts can be a challenging undertaking but it is a task that has a great bearing on how your article post will eventually rank. Here are some short tips, in no particular order, on choosing a good title and the reasoning behind it.

You must choose a title that contains your keyword: This is the most important aspect of selecting your post title. It basically tells Google the main idea of what your writing is about. This is especially important because most of your ranking power will come from this one single factor. But do not choose your title yet, see below.

Do not choose your title before you write the article: if you intend to write about go-carts then make sure you end up writing about that. After you are done with the article, try to ascertain what the main thrust of it is about. Jot down the main idea, followed by some ancillary thoughts. This will give you a better idea of what to title your post, and possibly even a subtitle.

Do not try to wrap your post around your keywords: Do not force keywords into your posts in an unnatural way. Make sure that the keywords or longtails appear in your article in a normal conversational way. Forcing the appearance of keywords is not only obvious to the reader, but is becoming obvious to the more sophisticated search engines and article site editors.

Do not select your keywords first: This pertains to the other tip about not forcing your keywords into the post. One sure fire way of having to force your keywords is by selecting them before you even know what your article is about. Yes, I realize that this goes against everything that the guru's teach us, but you have to understand that the game has changed; more and more people are getting into the article writing/ backlink game and now getting recognition is dependent on quality, not just relevancy. Write your article, determine the subject, use your keyword tool to then choose proper keywords and go back through your article and replace and edit where necessary.

Don't get off track: often times our writing gets "off track" as one idea after another comes into our head, and we end up with a mishmash of unrelated ideas and random thoughts. I like spaghetti. My sister was in town today. My fingernail looks like Jesus. My zipper is undone. Buy my affiliate product. Look! a fly.

Do not be too creative: being overly creative may be cute and it may even attract some visitors, but unfortunately, it won't attract any buyers. You don't want social visitors who are just curious surfers, you want search engine honed traffic. Choosing an overly creative title will not get you ranked for your root keywords. It's okay to be slightly creative in order to pique the interest of the searcher, but don't shoot yourself in the foot in favor of coolness.

Do not use the symbol "|" in your title: many people have started to use the vertical line symbol to separate their titles, thinking that they can get more titles in and thus more traffic. This does not work. Google sees all the words in your title as one. It counts the number of words and divides it in order to assess how much importance to give each word. How much importance is how much ranking authority. If your title is 14 words long then your longtail or keyword will not get the desired power. Secondly and more importantly, by using the | symbol you are effectively cutting off your possible longtails. For example, If your title were this:

Smoking Barbecue | Ribs for a Holiday| Recipes and More

then google will read that as three separate titles and a total of 9 words, with 5 of them being keyword intensive (Smoking, Barbecue, Ribs, Holiday, Recipes). Here is where you will be hurting yourself if you use the | symbol. Do you see other longtails in that title that you could also rank for but that are being cut off by the use of the | ? Exactly. There is "smoking barbecue ribs", "holiday recipes", "smoking for a holiday", "barbecue ribs recipes" etc. You never know what google will pick up on in your title but there is no reason why you, the author, should purposefully limit what you rank for.

Make your title accurate: Make your title something that the article is actually about. This goes along with a few of the other points so enough said.

Make you title short: making your title too long takes away the power punch that each word receives from google so make your title short and to the point.