The title of a blog post is extremely important.  Most blogging software takes the title and uses it both internally and external in the management of content.  Some places where the title of the blog appears are:

  • The URL of the post.
  • The H1 title or the actual post titles that a reader sees.
  • The HTML title tag

The problem you will find in most blog posts is that the HTML “title tag” is the single most important piece of content to a search engine but is often written to target human interests.   HTML title tags should be strategically used to drive search engine traffic versus copy that entices human readers.  According to a post in High Rankings, Title tags are considered to be in the big three which also includes visible copy and inbound link anchor text.  Still they are often overlooked by web masters and amateur bloggers.

Most blogging software and websites will allow title tags to be defined independently of content.  This is very important as humans and search engines are two different audiences.  I’m going to use a post on the website/blog of McCuistion TV as an example.

On October 25th, 2009, McCuistion TV broadcast a show on addiction which featured Chris Lawford Kenedy.   The title of the show was “The Causes of Addiction”.  The title of this show is excellent for human beings in that it is a teaser eluding to the fact that the show will reveal some of the causes of addiction.  From a search engine perspective, however, this title leaves a lot on the table.

The 2 word keyword pair “addiction causes” gets about 5,400 searches a month in Google.  The downside is that there are over 10 billion pages associated with this keyword pair in Google’s index.  Chris Lawford Kennedy gets about 2,000 searches per month and Chris Lawford Kennedy adiction only has 38,000 pages associated with it.  Though there are more searches associated with “addiction causes” the real opportunity is around Chris Lawford’s name the competition is much more approachable.  Thus, we published the McCuistion TV post “The Causes of Addiction” with a title tag that read “The Causes of Addiction – Christopher Lawson Kennedy”.  The result is that this post ranks in the top 4 hits in Google for both Lawford’s name as well as his name combined with the keyword “addiction”.

Title tags are very important as they are a blogger and/or webmaster’s interface to search engines.