AlphaTrilogy.com

12 October 2007

Blog Marketing 101: Get Site Traffic From Your Title

Posted by Darrell under: Blog Marketing 101 .

One of the biggest mistakes that bloggers make is failing to realize the importance of their titles. It is easy to fall into the trap of writing cutesy titles instead of informative traffic generating ones. I fall into this trap all the time myself. A cute title works in a magazine, it fails in a blog.

Phil and Bryan recently wrote articles about writing for your audience. In order to do this, we need to realize who our audience really is. For instance, on my blog I have a few dozen regular readers. These individuals either read or at least glance at most all of the posts I write. Cutesy titles are OK for these individuals. They know a little bit about me just from following my blog. They might appreciate a cute title. They’ll probably look at the post regardless of how its titled.

However, these individuals represent a small portion of my overall audience. Many of my visitors arrive at my site via searches and they are looking for specific information or topics. They know nothing at all about me and they probably don’t care (yet). They are looking for information. Do I have it or not?

A cute title that doesn’t really tell what the article is about won’t cut it for these individuals. They are going to simply move on and I can’t blame them. But, titles are much more important than simply determining whether someone is going to actually read your content or not. They help determine the amount of traffic (and opportunities for people to read your content) that you actually receive.

Here are some points that you should keep in mind when writing your blog posts:

• First and foremost, you need to set up your blog software so that every post has your post title in the URL. This is SO important! Changing your URLs to contain the title of your post and not just a variable will dramatically affect your overall search positioning and traffic. It will increase your traffic in two ways:  (1) You will show up higher in search results because the search engine spiders will have a better grasp of what each of your pages is actually about (2) More people will click thru from the search results page to your site because they, too, will have a better understanding of what your pages are about.
• Be specific with your titles rather than cute. A post about deer hunting in the heat entitled “Turn down the air” while possibly cut won’t get anywhere near the traffic that the same post entitled “Heat Wave Negatively Impacts Deer Hunting” will. Your regular readers will read the first one, but no one else will find it or read it.
• Think about search strings and key words when titling your posts. The closer your title is to the actual search strings (assuming it is highly relevant to the search) the more traffic you will receive. An article entitled “What Is The Best Deer Gun?” will probably get more traffic then “A Cool Gun For the Fall Woods”. People are searching What is Best Deer Gun everyday and your title completely matches their search!

I don’t want you to think I’m downplaying the importance of those ‘regular’ readers. Those are my favorite readers and the people that I end up writing the most for. However, you need new people to find (and READ) your site to ever increase the number of regulars you have. One of the easiest ways to get these new readers is to drive additional traffic via effective titles!

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