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Titles, headlines and more - Oh My!

By Mike | May 9, 2008

Today’s question:

Mike we all know that the headline or title of your post is crucial component for attracting visitors to your site. If I was posting a ‘How to’ post like: How to get bigger biceps, would I want to include one of my top keywords in the title ie: Body Building - How to get bigger biceps? Also wanted to know your thoughts on using “parenthesis” in a blog title that we know people are searching for ie: “How to get bigger biceps”. Will using the parenthesis help you in SE results if someone types in that exact phrase. Thank you

One of the reasons I use a plugin like All In One SEO is because of the importance of a headline. The problem is that you have two constituencies. Your readers and the search engines.

If you have this then you can take care of both by having two headlines. One for your readers - one for the spiders.

Here is an example from my blog at Mike Paetzold Recommends. The post is about Marlon Sanders new product Evergreen Traffic System.If you click that hyperlink you will see that the title of the post is “She’s back and Marlon found her“. That was written for my reader’s to create some curiousity. Check the bar on the browser and you will see a different title - “Evergreen Free Traffic System“. This ranked on the first page of Google for evergreen traffic system on the same day but probably would not have shown up in the top 50 if I had used just the post title.

Now as to your question on quotes.When someone uses quotes in a search query that is to only return results where the words show in that exact order. Not that they are in “quotes”.

The other part of the question is about your keyword choice. You will have a much easier time ranking highly for “bigger biceps” which in a quick check has 41,000 resuts versus “body building” which has 8,900,000 results searching both in quotes. If you start ranking for all those lower keywords you will eventually rank for the more competitive words too.

So to summarize I would probably have used a title like “5 ways to get bigger biceps faster” for my readers and changed it for the title tag to “Bigger biceps - 5 ways to do it faster” for my title tag.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

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