In the past few weeks, more and more of my mentoring clients want to talk about blogging, and in particular how to get more people to read their blogs.
“I’m Tweeting and Facebooking my blogs like mad, but I still only get a handful of readers, and that peters out after a few days”, one client said on the phone to me last week. And others are saying similar things.
It’s then that I ask the question: “How many visits do you get from the search engines to your blogs?” and the answer is invariably “Not many”.
But written well, a blog can be a traffic generator for months and even years.
See, it’s easy to think up a catchy headline for a blog, one that you just KNOW will have people who ‘follow’ or ‘like’ you clicking like mad. But you need to reach more people than just those who already know who you are.
What about the people searching on Google for the solution to a problem? Looking for a source of information? Perhaps looking for the exact thing your blog is written about, and in need of your services / products? They don’t know you from Adam, and they don’t follow you on Twitter or Facebook, but they’re your ideal customer. How are you going to reach those people?
In order to appear in (decent) results on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, you need to think about what people are searching for. And write your blog title accordingly.
“Oh but that means a really dull and obviously written title for search engines, and my blog is more creative than that”, said another client last week.
And I see her point – you don’t spend ages crafting a fantastic headline only to have to stuff it full of keywords so that it appeals to a search engine.
And that’s where an SEO plugin comes in handy.
Most SEO plugins for WordPress allow you to craft TWO titles for your blog posts. One of those titles will appear as the headline of the blog, so you can be as witty and clever as you like without worrying about those pesky search engines.
The OTHER title is one that appears at the top of the browser, and the one that Google will take into account when deciding where to put you in the results.
So, as an example, this blog is called “Why you should have 2 blog titles for most blogs you write” – that’s the title that will be Tweeted out, put on Facebook, show up in the blog listings etc.
However, the SEO title, as you will see from the top of the browser, is “How can I get my blogs to show up in Google? Two titles!”
That’s because I know that no-one is searching for ’2 blog titles’ but I know that people are searching for ‘how do i get my blogs to show up in google’ and variations thereof. I could have made my SEO title “SEO for blogging – how 2 titles will help” or “Getting blogs into search engines – use 2 titles” – get the picture?
So when writing your next blog, think about the people who AREN’T following you, don’t know who you are, but are out there looking for the solution you provide. Write 2 blog titles for every post and let me know on LinkedIn how you get on!
(As an aside, because I write a lot of my blog posts in response to questions, the titles I write tend to do OK in Google, so I don’t always have 2 titles – you may be the same, in which case, carry on.)
