Comments on: Search Engine Friendly Article Titles

By: Engineering Colleges

Engineering Colleges — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:57:51 +0000

Frequent deep linking also helps a lot. Every so often, you can do a blog entry that just refers to old entries. Lifehacker does that well; every week or so the folks there do a “a year ago, we taught you how to ______”. Since most blogs have a focused topic, it should be easy to embed a link or two to quality previous entries in each new entry.

By: Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:42:38 +0000

Thanks for the useful tips! I’m still experimenting with how to bring traffic to my site through focusing my posts, but at the same time I don’t want to be repetitive.

By: Revellian

Revellian — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:58:57 +0000

@Teeni: Thanks! I don’t try for catchy titles so much as I do for search engine indexing. It’s nice if I’m able to do both though.

@Stephan: I’ve tried that(with AllInOneSeoPack) and I used to use the seo slugs plugin. I have never noticed even the slightest difference with removing stop words – it seems like google doesn’t pay attention to them anyway. Sometimes I think some stop words actually help indexing…lol. Maybe using a different title tag might help more if you have articles with similar content or similar titles, and a unique title tag can help index it differently. I’m willing to try anything and nearly all techniques seem to have value these days.

By: Stephan Miller

Stephan Miller — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:13:16 +0000

Do you ever do anything different with the slug or make the page title tag different than the article title (with an SEO plugin)? I have played with this a little. Just want to know if this helps much. For example, using stems or synonyms in the html title or removing stop words from the page slug?

By: teeni

teeni — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:35:33 +0000

There’s a lot of good info here. Thanks for sharing your insights with us, Bobby. I appreciate it. I’ve always liked trying to have catchy titles but didn’t know how to make them work for me.

By: Revellian

Revellian — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:01:48 +0000

@Robin: I would only aim for a great title on the posts you feel are your best ones. Just try different things. You could try google analytics if you want to get serious!

@Michelle: Haha! Like I told you in my previous reply, your Wordless Wednesday titles are fine the way they are. What I meant in the article is that only using the title “Wordless Wednesday” with no additional keywords is not good. Lots of folks have 75 “Wordless Wednesday” posts and they only differ in the publishing date. As long as you add something like “Wordless Wednesday: My Dad” or something similar, you’ll be ok!

@Sue: In your case, I would not change it. Your readers are already used to it. I do the same thing with my “Bobby’s Batch” articles, but I add a different title after “Bobby’s Batch” to make each one more unique.

You could try something like “Blogosphere News: Great CSS Tutorials” if you had a particular episode of similarly themed links in that particular post. That’s up to you. Overall, I’d say to not change it unless you just want to try something new.

I usually apply this concept to unique individual articles that I want to do well.

By: Sueblimely

Sueblimely — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:42:10 +0000

I do a semi regular post entitled Blogosphere News to vary it I just add the date – I often wonder if it is wise using this title each time though. What do you think?

By: Michelle Gartner

Michelle Gartner — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:52:21 +0000

Ha Ha Bobby- I took Wordless Weds out of my post as per your post Google sugestion and I can see by my blog log that the regulars from WW have been by- but no one has commented but one guy. I usually have about 10 to 15 comments from WW. I am sad and stumped all at once. I mean there is a picture there- and I am up in the WW roll and I see the visitors- do I have to spell out WW. I blame you! Hee Hee Or maybe the picture of my dad is scaring people away oh boo hoo- how that makes me even more sad!

By: Robin

Robin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:29:11 +0000

I’ll definitely keep titles in mind from now on. The only search I’ve ever been number one on I believe is “bong cozy” and yes, there are several of them, oddly enough

By: Revellian

Revellian — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:28:05 +0000

@Rayhere: I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Please explain a little more clearly.