Choosing Good Titles

Choosing a good title is extremely important for any website. Titles should grab your user’s attention, and make known exactly what is going to be presented - at the same time.

With blogging, it is even more important to choose good titles for your posts. If they subscribe to your RSS Feed, they’ll likely see the title first. If you leave a trackback on another site, it’ll leave your title. If they view your archive pages, there your title is!

A title needs to grab your user’s attention. If it doesn’t, they’ll likely not notice it and not try to read more. Some blog sites have the date as the title. How is that going to help anyone? When you view the post, it tells you the date anyways. It just makes it worse when viewing feeds and archives.

A good title will be short, straight to the point, yet descriptive of the content. For instance, this post is titled “Choosing Good Titles”. And guess what I’m discussing? That’s right, Choosing Good Titles. I bet it caught some attention.. Who want’s to choose BAD titles?

Here are some tips for choosing good titles:

1. Try not to use “How To” in the title. I could have named this post “How to choose good titles”, but is it really neccessary? “Choosing Good Titles” already leads you to beleive I’m going to tell you how.
2. Use words everyone will understand. Keep the lingo in the content, where your users will be able to see the context and understand it. You want everyone reading your title to clearly understand what its about.
3. Write the title AFTER writing the post. Especially if you are running a blog that isn’t specific topics like this one. Recently two of my friends both made posts that had completely off topic titles. If you are writing your thoughts, chances are your post will go different than the title. If you are writing tutorials on the other hand, its easy to stay on topic.

One last thing, remember that Search Engines will use your title not only to display in the results, but they also use the title to determine the ranking of your site. If your title is “Choosing Good Titles”, and people are searching for just that, chances are it will come up higher than if your title was something else.