This can be tricky, but extremely important. Your title needs to describe the content of your post accurately, but it also needs to hook people in.

If someone has performed a search on Google it stands to reason they are looking for something, your title needs to convey that our post contains the answer.

If someone is scanning through a large collection of post titles in their RSS reader, or in some form of aggregator, your title needs to stand out in some way.

For example, a bad example of a blog post would be my post title ‘Business Blogging’. I was indeed writing about Business Blogging, but that is a terribly generic title. I should, in fact, have titled the post something like ‘Small Irish businesses fail to reap blogging benefits’, which would have been more descriptive and more immediately engaging than simply ‘Business Blogging’ which fails to give any indication of the contents.

Finding the balance is a skill. My advice is to start with the title you think best describes the post and then try to improve on it.

For example I recently wrote a post about blog comments. I started with a descriptive title ‘Managing blog comments’ and then, because this was a bit generic I added ‘The blog police will get you!’ which had relevance to the post, and added a little bit of flavour to an otherwise rather pedestrian title, so the final title was ‘The Blog Police will get you! Managing blog comments’.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.