What should I write in my blog and how to choose post titles?

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When choosing what to write in your blog (topic, article titles, content etc.) it is important to understand 2 basic concepts:

First is that content is the most important success factor of any web site or blog so this is where you should spend most of your time and second you should realize that you are not alone and so you don’t only have to create excellent content but you also have to compete with other web sites that create good content as well. I will explain below why this is important and what you can do to minimize your competition.

What should I write about?

In my seo tips for beginners article I have explained what is consider good quality content but for the purpose of this article I will go one step further and explain how to distinguish your content from the competition which is essentially the answer to the question: what should I write about so that it stands out.

Before to start writing you next blog post ask yourself these questions:

1. What would be the topic of my post?
2. Will my post answer a question or solve a problem?
3. What others are writing about the particular topic?
4. How can I differentiate my content from existing posts and make it better?

Once you have the above questions answered your next step is to decide on the actual blog post title, write the post, publish it and promote it.

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How to choose your blog post titles?

The blog post title is important for 3 main reasons:

1. A good title will attract more readers and social media attention
2. A good title is essential for SEO purposes
3. Blog titles should help both readers and search engines understand what the post is all about. Google has recently released a one-page cheat sheet stressing the importance of page titles for SEO purposes so it is not something you should neglect for any reason.

So, you know what will be the topic and type of your post and the next step is to choose the actual blog post title. This is where the Google keyword tool comes into rescue.

How to use the Google keyword tool for choosing your blog post titles?

The Google keyword tool among many other useful features gives you 2 pieces of information that are important when choosing blog titles: The number of exact searches per keyword and the competition level for that keyword. I will use these 2 in the example below to help you understand how to choose blog titles that have less competition and thus increase your chances of ranking higher for that term.

Let’s look at the following real example:

What would be the topic of my post?	Weight loss
Will my post answer a question or solve a problem?	Yes, my intention is to explain to my readers how to lose weight
What others are writing about the particular topic?	Searching “how to lose weight” “how to lose weight fast” “weight loss” “I want to lose weight” “how to lose pounds” brings a number of results from trusted web sites and my chances of ranking for these terms are minimum to zero
How can I differentiate my content and make it better?	I want to take a step-by-step approach to weight loss and explain how to calculate the weight you should lose and how to create your plan

Notice in the above table that I added the note “my chances of ranking for these terms are minimum to zero”. This is important and what this means is that even if I write a super article with the title “how to lose weight” (or any of the above titles) I will probably never be able to rank in the first positions because there are already trusted web sites in the first page and I need to give Google many concrete and powerful reasons to give me a good ranking.

In reality this is unlikely to happen so this is where I go to the keyword tool.

The first things I do are set the location to ALL Countries and the Match Types to Exact.

Next I start searching for keywords. Continuing with the example above I started searching with the phrase “how to lose pounds”.

From the results what I am interested at the moment is the Competition column and the Global monthly searches column. In particular I am looking for Low competition long trail keyword ideas with some monthly searches. Of course the more monthly searches a keyword have the better, but don’t forget that what is displayed there is only an indication and I have found many times keywords to bring much more traffic than the estimate given here. Also the lower the numbers, the greater are the chances for the estimates to be inaccurate.

Back to our example, fortunately for the term I choose there are many low competition keyword ideas that can satisfy my needs as outlined in the table above.

I did search for the other terms as well but without spending too much time I decided that a keyword that has low competition and a good amount of global monthly searches and fits my topics subject and purpose is “how to lose 15 pounds”.

To cut a long story short and also convince that this methodology works you can search Google for the above term and you will see my article on page 1, position 1.

You can also see below a screenshot from Google Analytics showing that in a period of one month the particular page has brought in twice the traffic estimated by the keyword tool.

So, to summarize this post it is important to remember that:

1. You don’t only have to create good content but you also have to select your blog titles carefully after doing a keyword analysis using the keyword tool and a competition analysis by searching for those terms on Google.
2. By selecting blog titles with low competition you increase the changes of ranking higher
3. Choose your blog topic first, find the title and then write the content
4. Once published make sure that you promote your blog post in the best possible way
5. Include keywords in your blog post titles but don’t overdo it (see my example above and notice the title I have selected which contains the keywords I want to rank for).
6. Don’t follow the above procedure for all your blog posts. Choose in advance which blog posts to optimize with the above method but also make sure that you have non-optimized posts in your web site/blog as well.