How to Make Your Blog Article Titles More Search Engine Friendly

A mistake that I see a lot in business blogging is that the blog titles are not specific enough. When blog titles are too vague, not only do they not full tell the reader what the blog post is about, but the vague blog title makes it harder for your post to rank on search engines. Blog titles are just as important to the SEO mix as the content itself, the meta descriptions, tags, hyperlinking, photos etc. The titles are the first thing readers see (and may be the only thing they read) before deciding whether to read the post, so it needs to count.

The way to make your blog titles more search engine friendly is to make them more specific. More specific means that it ranks for a long-tailed keyword related to your industry instead of a generic keyword that's not necessarily related. To start, let's illustrate a blog title that's vague and not very search engine friendly:

Keeping a Business Calendar

It may seem specific and straightforward, but it's really not. What about keeping a business calendar? Is the post about how to keep one? Why we should keep one? What kind of business calendar? Weekly, monthly, yearly, insurance, finance, appointment? The questions can go on for a while. Utilizing these questions, here's how this title can be made more specific and more search engine friendly (each change is underlined):

• Keeping a Weekly Business Calendar
• Keeping a Weekly Business Insurance Calendar
• How to Keep a Weekly Business Insurance Calendar
• How to Keep a Weekly Business Insurance Calendar in 5 Steps
• How to Keep a Weekly Business Insurance Calendar in 5 Simple Steps

Look at how specific the title is now! We did that by adding adjectives and other words to describe we are talking about. Not only are we clear on what exactly this blog post is about, but a reader would also know right away whether or not this is a blog post to read. If the reader needs help keeping an insurance business calendar, this might be a good one!

Also look at how many keywords this post could rank for now! In the original title, there were only two keywords: "keeping a business calendar" and "business calendar". However, this new one could rank for:

• insurance business calendar
• weekly insurance business calendar
• how to keep a keep a weekly insurance business calendar
• keeping a weekly insurance business calendar
• keeping an insurance business calendar

Those may be very specific keywords that don't get a lot of traffic. BUT, the traffic that the blog post does get from those keywords will be high quality because that traffic will be finding exactly what they are looking for. That's the kind of traffic you want, since you'll be able to convert them into leads much more easily. It's also more search engine friendly, since this post is now able to rank for more keywords, and more specific keywords that don't have a lot of competition.

To make your blog article titles more search engine friendly, you need to get specific. A specific blog article title may be harder to come up with than a vague, so what you can do is start with the vague title and add in adjectives and other words where possible to make it more specific, just like we did in the example.

If you want more tips to improve your blog article titles, then check out our ultimate checklist to great blog article headlines. To download it, click the button below: