I previously discussed the important first step in naming your blog post titles – addressing your readers.

When the posts are now in the archives, you will now have to consider how other readers will discover your posts. And this is through the help of search engines. This is where the second step comes in, which is to address search engine users. The titles you compose should be sensitive to the requirements of search engine bots so that you get the coveted first SERP.

So how do you compose your blog post title to take advantage of search engines?

* Put important keywords in the title. From the first step you have already added a few relevant keywords that will appeal to readers who are on the lookout for words that will appeal to them. Now you have to beef it up some more by adding a few more keywords. Don’t overdo it though, your title should still be interesting and not losing its target.

* Mix up the word order. Changing the word order in your title could actually help you gain a few extra places in SERPS. The trick to rearranging the title is by making sure the beneficial keywords are closer to the start of the title.

* Fix the TITLE. One other thing that you should consider fixing up is the TITLE or the title tag. Usually the blog post title will be similar or will match the title tag. But when you’re already on the second step, you can tweak your title tag some more so that it is more optimized to be noticed by search engine bots. One easy way to do this if you’re using WordPress is by installing and using the SEO Title Tag plugin.

* Leave slugs alone. Even though you are tweaking the title tag and the blog post title, you should not do anything with the actual page slug. Avoid doing things to it at all costs.

Originally posted on May 22, 2009 @ 12:39 pm