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Blog Headlines and Titles Are Important

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 9:29 AM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog 2 comments

I tried to get creative with my blog entry titles once upon a time. Over time I learned that’s not a good idea unless you don’t care about search engine traffic. That’s a laugh, right? How many people don’t care about search engine traffic? Ted does an excellent job explaining the importance of blog titles.

At the end, he asks why the subtitle of his entry is in a larger font. I think the subtitle is a better title than the main one and he uses h1 around the subtitle, which gets a higher preference in search engines — if I remember right.

His uses h3 around the title. Technically, it’s wrong to use h3 before h1, but there are exceptions to every rule and I’m sure he has valid reasons for doing this and I look forward to reading the follow up.

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2 comments

Posted by Easton Ellsworth on January 4th, 2006, 1:38 PM
I, too, tried once upon a time (read: 2005) to be pithy and creative with my post titles. Now I’m attempting the harder but more rewarding path of clear, descriptive, keyword-rich titles. So far it’s working very well. It’s still difficult to forgo alliteration, pop culture references and provocative words in favor of what works best (plain vanilla keywords), but I’m slowly learning. Thanks for the insightful comments. The blog network I write for, Know More Media, will surely benefit from using smart headlines.
Posted by Ted Demopoulos on January 4th, 2006, 9:25 PM
Hi Meryl,

You’ve got it exactly right!
Now whether you can use more than one h1 tag is somewhat contentious and SEO experts (I don’t claim to be one) argue about it – try a Google search for some viewpoints, for example on “multiple h1 tags.” Actually SEO experts seem to argue about a lot, especially since we don’t know exactly what the search engines do and we can at best guess.

Personally, although I’m very conservative with trying not to annoy the almighty search engines , when it comes to h1 tags I don’t think 2 is excessive — as long as they make sense in context.

Now I wouldn’t use ten h1 tags for example, like I’ve seen some people do.

I’ve used h1 tags for subheadings on about 10 different blogs and it seems to work – the search engines don’t get mad and are willing to rank the posts highly.

I need to write this up for my blog sometime soon too . . .