Saturday, March 29, 2014

3 Tips for Creating Creative Titles

You may think you have it down, but consider the thought process behind some of the titles you see every day — they need to speak the same language across the board stand out to your reader on a number of different platforms.

Searchable 

Creative Titles
Did you name your title your post specifically to something you believe your reader would google? That’s a start, but it all has to do with three letters: SEO or Search Engine Optimization. There are a bunch of services out there, like HubSpot to assist you in finding out how your title will rank when you use the correct longtail keywords.

Longtail keywords are keywords that are about three words long. Say you’re a startup company in San Francisco that specializes in fashionable hearing aids for cats.
Yes, it does sound ridiculous but stay with me…
If you’re in the business of ear health, you should be posting about what you know. So say you were writing a post about the benefits of cleaning a cat’s ears regularly, what would keywords do you think would work best within your title and body of your post?
The Benefits of a Weekly Cat Ear Cleaning.
Cat Ear Cleaning would be your longtail keyword. It seems more searchable than the rest. If you wanted to continue attempting to rank for the keyword it would be in your best interest to use the same keyword in a series of posts. Try following up with The ProperCat Ear Cleaningtechnique.
If you’re using a keyword service you would type a series of keywords and see which has a good balance between monthly searches and its ability to rank highly in a google search.

Eye-catching

Creative Titles
While a post about proper ear cleaning techniques of felines may not be interesting (to some people…) you might make to want a title like this pop.

Let’s try using the same title, except this time we’ll catch the reader’s attention that evokes emotion.
Tips for Cat Lovers: Proper Cat Ear Cleaning Techniques
or…
Tips for Cat Lovers: Proper Cat Ear Cleaning Techniques of the Pros
or…
Cat-hacks: Proper Cat Ear Cleaning Techniques
The pros! That sounds professional – and we trust that you’re giving them professional information within the post. Cat-hacks! Everyone knows what life-hacks are, now cats have them too.
The point to this exercise is that you can re-work your title around until it rolls of the tongue. This step may take awhile at first, but you’ll become expert title artists in no time.

Informative

Creative Titles
Your title needs to reflect exactly what your article is about in under 70 characters – that’s HALF of a tweet! This is harder than you thought…

WRONG!
Guys, relax. You can say a lot in a short amount of time, you just need to get the basic facts in the title. Back to our clean ear cat statement – this start up company in San Francisco is new and edgy. They want to get the point across in a punchy way because they are HIP. They make fashionable cat hearing aids. So, naturally it would be best to coin something like the aforementioned cat-hacks so the audience become familiar with your theme.


Tips

  • Come up with an editorial calendar so you know what you’ll be writing about in advance.
  • Use a keyword service – without having the knowledge of what keywords rank your posts may fall flat.
  • Hire a professional to do the dirty work – we mean the SEO and blogging of course because blogging can (and is) a profession on its own.
The best thing to remember is your titles have to reflect your company. If you’re a fun, edgy company just roll with it. If you’re a straight laced law firm, keep it professional. And if you’re a company that raises alpaca do NOT post about the proper cat eat cleaning techniques because that has nothing to do with your company.

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