A rose by any other name is just as sweet (or is it?)

There’s a lot to be said about writing a good title. It’s more than likely the only thing people may ever read, therein lay the challenge of your titles. Why is that you ask? Well, all the search engine results for your posts will be displayed as a the title for the link text (AKA anchor text), with a very short description that often times gets cut off. People read the title first, then the description (if at all). You want your titles to catch potential readers attention, and at the same time be a good descriptive of the post it’s attached to.

Your title is your HEADLINE

When preparing to write this post, I had to think about the title. I’m mean posts about titles aren’t exactly exciting, there’s no glamor, no sex appeal, in fact, this is a boring post. I wanted to catch your eye, draw you in, make you just HAVE to read this post. I was tempted to use a really over the top title to do just that, and to make a point. Initially I almost used; “Gov. officially releases photos of Aliens from Roswell”, or “Kennedy assassination; 2nd gunman comes forward”, or something like that. But those are a little too over the top, too “National Enquirer”, but most importantly, totally off the subject.

It’s all just a balancing act

Just getting readers is good, but not good enough. If I did a post with a totally outrageous title and pulled in 10,000 readers, sure it would be good for my numbers, my Alexa rating would benefit, but would the readers? Probably not… Would this blog benefit in the long term? No. I want to pull in as many readers as I can, but I also want those readers to actually be interested in what I have to say. I want them to bookmark this blog, subscribe to my RSS feed, learn a little something they wanted to learn, check out some other posts - come back for more.

I want balance.

There’s more to it than meets the eye

Titles can also be a HUGE benefit to your SEO efforts. I use the Wordress plugin All In One SEO Pack so I can in effect have two titles. One that you see, one the search engines see. The SE’s use the title to help determine the relevance of a post in relation to the search term used in that particular query. But just because I use the AIO SEO pack doesn’t mean I completely dismiss the title I use at the top of the page. The SE’s still see it as text in my post, and they weigh that info too, so I always (almost) try to make both my titles as relevant as possible. So should you.

So, let this just be a short little lesson for you. Your title is one of the most important things about each of your posts. Make them catchy. Make them stand out. Make them relevant. Coming up with titles that are all these things is tough, but I have faith in you…

Oh yeah, the reason the title to this posts sucked is I used only one keyword “title” and didn’t use a relevant key phrase like “writing good titles” or something like that. I seriously doubt anyone will ever search for “why this title sucks”. But that’s OK, this time…

And when I was looking for images for the eye catching part, I came across this image :arrow:

It’s all fun and game ’till someone looses an eye

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