How to Make a Good Title for Your Blog Post

Writing a good blog post title is really important. Before anyone would start reading your post, he or she would have to decide whether it is worth his or her time. A good title is one way to convince someone to actually click through and read your post. 

It's not just people that you need to convince that your content is good based on the title. If you want to get free traffic from Google and social media sites, you need to craft an appropriate, attention-grabbing blog title. 

This is what we will be talking about in this blog post. 

5 Things to Consider When Crafting a Good Title

1. Know Your Keywords 

The first thing you need is to know the right keywords to put in your title. The keywords must be a phrase that the search engines like because people are searching for it. If your keyword satisfies that condition, you will always have readers clicking on your titles. 

So, how do you find the right keywords?

You can use your favorite keyword research tool like the Google Keyword Planner to look for keywords or keyphrases that you want your blog post to rank for. 

For example, you wrote a review about five of the best coffeemakers in the market, you probably would discover that you need keywords such as best coffeemakers to rank in the search engines. So be sure to add those keywords to your title. 

2. Make the Title Interesting 

Aside from adding the keyword into your title, remember that you need to make the title interesting for your readers. How do you that? Honestly, I'm not great at doing this. But what I do is write a few different blog post titles for my article. And then I just choose the title that I think is good with the hope that my blog readers (and the search engines) would find it interesting, too.

There are various articles online that suggest adding 5 things in a title to make it catchy:

• Number like 5 Easy Tips, 12 Effective Ways to
• Trigger word include How to, Tips, Tricks, Reasons, Lessons, Ideas
• Adjective like Free, Essential, Effective, Good, Awesome, Great, Happy, Cool
• Keyword or your topic
• Promise like How to Clean a Room in Ten Minutes

Note: When making a promise, don't hype it up; don't exaggerate or tell lies. Be sure to deliver what you promised by giving what the title promised.

3. Use a Free Headline Analyzer Tool

Sometimes, I also use a free headline analyzer tool at CoSchedule to help me create a title. For this post, for example, the three titles that I thought of were given the following scores by the said tool: 

So, I just used the blog post title with the highest score. 

4. Keep Titles Short and Engaging

Shorter titles seem to have better click-throughs. This has been found to be true both on blogs and social media posts. Don't write titles longer than 70 characters. If you do, Google will cut short the title when indexing. So, be sure to keep titles short and to the point. Also, use the title to engage your readers. You can do that by:

• Asking your readers a question. 
• Making a statement that makes them think. 
• Including numbers in the titles (already mentioned above) to let them know what they can expect to find in your post (i.e. My 5 Best Tips To …) 
• Solving a problem that your reader will find very useful
• Be specific. It's better to narrow down your title and try to tackle a very broad topic

5. Don't Just Copy - Be You

You can certainly keep in mind the tips mentioned above and you can create a swipe file of catchy titles that can you tweak. But remember to stick with your own style. Your titles should still reflect the tone of voice of your blog posts.

Find the BALANCE between giving what your audience and the search engines want AND expressing your style and voice when making the titles and content of your blog posts. 

Just to recap what was discussed about making a good title for your blog post, start with the keyword. Then think about your audience and the type of information they are looking for. State in your title what ís in it for them and deliver what you promised in your content. 

You will get better at writing a good title after publishing a number of blog posts. Pay attention to what’s working and what's not with your blog's readership. What's working for other bloggers may not be working for you. That is something you'll learn along the way.

Just keep going and improve your titles as you go. 

Do you have any tips to share on making a good title for a blog post? Please share in the comments below.

This is the second post in our Better Blogging Challenge. If you have any tips to share on making a good title for a blog post, please share, please in the comments below. 

Thank you for reading.