Post Title:
- Include keywords - search engines pay special attention to blog post titles. In analyzing the web analytics of over 60 clients, I have noticed a strong correlation between post title and referring keyword traffic.
- Indicative of post content - don't deceive readers with a title that doesn't reflect the actual post content. A poor user experience won't do anyone favors - including yourself.
- Make it catchy - See the image below for a progression towards writing a great post title.
- Be Pithy - make your content digestible by keeping it to a few paragraphs and by using bullet points.
- Use keywords - don't just use keywords in the body of your post - also use other contextually relevant words to clue the search engines in to the relevancy of your post. If you are blogging about Google Analytics, also use terms like "advanced segments" and "referral traffic". This will help you maintain relevancy without being spammy and using the targeted keyword(s) over and over.
- Use pictures/video - pictures and video are engaging and also draw search from Google images and, if you embed a video from YouTube, searches on YouTube. YouTube and Google Image Search are two huge search areas themselves, so don't miss this opportunity. Don't forget to use alt tags to properly describe your image/video as search engines look at these tags to determine search value.
- Include links - link relevant keywords, products, offerings, etc. to other relevant pages on your website or other sites. Linking out to other topically relevant pages will help strengthen your relevancy to the topic at hand. Linking product names and or keywords to targeted pages on your site will strengthen their SEO relevance to the targeted product/terms and will also send visitors to those valuable pages where they can convert.
