by Dave Zielski on September 16, 2009
in Blogging
Too many times I have seen blogs that have the title of a blog post something like “here we go” or “product release”. While this is great for people that actually follow their blog or are big fans or have thousands of visitors per day, these titles do not index well with the search engines and are too broad to really mean anything in particular to anyone.
One of the main ingredients to writing an effective title for a blog post will be to use descriptive relevant keywords that define what your content is about. For instance if I was writing an article on changing the air filter on my blue with tan interior 1999 Acura 3.2tl with 109, 990 miles on it, I would probably name the post “How to change an air filter on a 1999 Acura 3.2tl”. Notice, it is descriptive enough, but I only use the relevant terms. For instance, color and mileage is not relevant to the changing of an air filter so I do not include them in the title. I may talk about them in the post, but for the title we only need relevant information. Also note, It is not obscure like “Changing a filter on an Acura”. The year, model and type of filter are all relevant pieces of information that need to be included in your title.
Next, I use a verb or action word in the title if I can. “How to” is an action that relates to doing something. You need to perform an action to change an air filter on a car, to buy a product or service. Some blogging experts carry this one step further and attempt to grab the reader’s attention with stronger titles like “Here’s a Quick Way to change an air filter on a 1999 Acura 3.2tl”. Other attention getting headlines can be found here: 10 sure fire headline formulas that work.
Now that you have read this, take a look at the title of this blog post “How to write effective and attention getting titles and headlines for your blog posts”. Do you think it was descriptive enough or too vague? Did it convey action for you? I hope so. Comments are appreciated and welcome. Thank you.
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There has been some talk going around the Internet about Google working with a new web search. Of course, this makes most entrepreneurs and web programmers nervous as all the hard work they have been doing for years to get secure organic search rankings may come undone with a flip of a switch. This is what they had to say on Google’s official site on crawling and indexing:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.“
I want to thank Kalena Jordan who wrote an excellent article for SitePro News and tested several searches with the current search engine compared to the new Google Caffeine version and the conclusions are listed below.
• Probably the biggest eyebrow raiser for me was the marked jump in keyword density between SERPS on the old Google and SERPS on Caffeine. In nearly every comparison, the Caffeine SERPS featured site titles and snippets with a much higher phrase and/or keyword density. Coincidence? I doubt it.
• It’s definitely faster. Every search query I tried on Caffeine was returned at a faster speed than with the current Google. Impressive.
• Caffeine seems slightly fresher. Some of the results I observed in Caffeine SERPS and not in regular Google SERPS were more current. For example, blog posts published within the last couple of days.
• Apart from the ego search, old Google out performed Caffeine in the index size category. But this is likely because only a handful of data-centers have Caffeine on board so far.
• Caffeine definitely has a heavier emphasis on social media, with results from sites like Blogger, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Profiles featuring more prominently, particularly for name searches. Wiki pages still seem to rank highly in both Caffeinated and Decaffeinated Google.
Bottom line is that businesses that use blog and social media could be very happy with the new Google Caffeine. With social media and blogging becoming a major part of a business’s marketing plan, it is nice to see that these efforts could be rewarded soon with a search engine that looks closely at social media channels.
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