If you’re just starting up your blogging, you’ve got a lot to learn – but don’t stop that from going ahead and posting on your new blog. It’s better to learn on the job, as it also allows you to see the results of what you just learned. To help you get started, here are three quick tips to writing great blog titles:
1. Leverage Human Interest
Nothing attracts readership better than interesting headlines. While there are multitudes of styles and tricks you can apply to your headlines, here are 3 C’s that really make it big with readers:
– Curiosity. If you can make your blog title invoke curiosity within your readers, nature will take its course and lead them to your blog posts. The trick lies with empathy – if you can effectively put yourself in the position of your readers and ask: “does this title make me curious enough to find out what the author is talking about?”, then you can gauge how well your curious titles resonate with your audience. Another trick to raising curiosity is using questions in your titles. Use open-ended questions to engage the minds of your readers.
-Controversy. If you don’t mind your blog becoming something of a hot spot, you can use controversy in your favor. Everybody has an opinion, and if you want your blog to become an authority in your niche you will have to voiceyour own opinions and substantiate it with analyses, facts, and figures. Now using controversy does not necessarily mean baiting your readers in with potentially inflammatory titles. Often all you need is a controversial topic to write about and a title that hints on it. If you want to try a more neutral approach, try using public opinion instead of your own. Begin something like a poll where your readers can vote on a certain topic – once the poll is closed you can write a blog post focused on the results.
-Comedy. People read blogs that are useful, informative, and downright fun. If you can write an entertaining blog post, you have to match it with an equally entertaining blog headline. A comedic headline tickles your readers imagination and hints on how much fun they will have reading your post. Comedic headlines can also be used to stylishly accompany a serious post – this requires time to be able to sufficiently use, but is well worth the effort to try.
2. Keywords Next
Keywords are important not just for search engine optimization (SEO), but also for human readability.
– For SEO: building content around keywords is quintessential for organic SEO because it is the only way to ensure that search engines know what your blog is about; this also means keywords should be prioritized within blog headlines. Remember to research what keywords rank higher than others (e.g. “US” ranks higher than “USA” and “United States”) and incorporate only one keyword phrase per blog title. It is best if your keywords are either in the first or last part of your blog titles, but for optimization purposes, it’s better to put keywords in the first few words.
– For readability: your readers need to know what your blog post is about as soon as they read the title. This makes keyword usage within blog headlines all the more crucial. Remember, however, that too many keywords or unnatural wording resulting from forcing keyword use can negatively impact your readership. Try to find ways to get around tricky keywords or use something similar to your primary keyword in your title and instead – this is called Latent Semantic Indexing.
- Use Numbers (Where Applicable)
There is a quirk within the modern mind that you can use to make your blog headlines more powerful, and that is using numbers within your titles. Numbers denote figures that in our brains appear to be much more important than they actually are. For instance, if you read a sentence with a statistic about a storm’s death toll, the numbers help deliver more impact. Numbers also lend an air of authority, credibility, and reliability to your blog, especially if you can cite sources. Note that you should also use numerals (“3” for three and 15,000 for “fifteen thousand”) whenever you can, because numerals are much easier to spot than worded numbers, and this helps with your blog headlines’ readability.
Despite being “quick” tips, these three tricks require a certain amount of practice to use with any level of efficacy. And like all other tactics, if you use them too much, it can backfire and lead to the opposite of what you wanted. So remember to prioritize keywords, leverage human interest, and use numbers within your blog headlines.