Not only will an effective title for your blog posts drive traffic to your website, but they can also help your search engine rankings. A catchy title is just as essential as the content within your blog post. Without a compelling title to grab your (potential) reader’s eye & attention, they’ll just keep scrolling right past it in their inboxes and social media feeds. The point of writing a blog post is for people to read it, right? Your titles need to evoke interest, emotion & be relevant – all while being SEO-friendly. So how do you drive readers to your page and widen your audience? Here are our tips to title your blog post, which is one of the first steps in doing just that!

Make it SEO optimized

To make your blog title more optimized for search engines (which is major key!), first figure out what your blog post is about. Extract some keywords from your blog body content and begin to work with that. These keywords will help your search engine rankings. If you wrote your entire blog post about hiking in North Carolina, that’s where you should begin! A Google search can be helpful with this. Pull up Google and start typing in “Hiking in North Carolina..” or whatever your blog post is about to see how other popular search terms come up. While there are other more in-depth ways of keyword researching, this is very user-friendly. If you have a little more experience under your belt, you can experiment with some of these tools like this. 

Fill in the blank

There are more than several templates to use to title your blog posts! It is key to use a title that poses your blog post as a tutorial or guide, a list, a set of tips, the answer to a question, or a comparison of something relevant. If you follow viral news sites like Mashable or Elite Daily, you can see how they use titles like the ones we’ve listed below to catch the attention of their followers and in turn drive traffic to their website.

  • “How to ________”
  • “Top __ Tips On Why You Should ________”
  • “The Ultimate Guide to ________”
  • “What No One Tells You About ________”
  • “You’re Doing it Wrong: ________”
  • “Essential Steps in ________”
  • “How to Use ________ to Stand Out”
  • “Where to Find the Best ________”
  • “How to Spot ________”

If you’re writing a blog post on website development, instead of “Creating a Website,” you should use “The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Amazing Website” or “The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Website” instead. See how much more compelling those are?

Keep it short

A lengthy blog post title is typically viewed as drawn-out, and not drawing attention. You’re better off keeping it simple when it comes to titling a blog post. If you were writing a post about restaurants in New York City, instead of using “My Favorite Dining Spots and Restaurants in New York City for Die-Hard Food Fanatics,” use “The Die-Hard Foodie’s Guide to New York City.” You don’t want people to get bored just by reading your title, that’s only a sign they’ll get bored reading your post.

Use adjectives

If you’ve forgotten what an adjective is, it’s a describing word (ie: amazing, incredible, creative). Use these kind of words in your blog titles. A title like “The DIY Guide to Installing an Amazing Backsplash” is going to catch more readers’ attention than “The DIY Guide to Installing Backsplashes.” One simple word can change the entire tone.

Never mislead your reader

The worst thing you can do is lose credibility by titling your blog post with something that has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re writing about. It’s never smart to manipulate people into reading your posts just by using a catchy irrelevant title. Your title should always match or coincide with your content!

Be unique

This one goes without saying! If you want to stand out from the crowd, be unique with your blog post titles. Focus is on why your blog post is unique and use that in your title. If you blog post is a recipe for strawberry shortcake cupcakes, what makes these different from any other strawberry cupcake? Did you use a secret ingredient? Was the recipe passed down from previous generations? Use that!

We hope our guide takes your blog post titles to new heights!