Blow them out of the water.

First let us define what is meant here by a great blog post. I am assuming that if you are reading this post you are looking for ways to increase the readership of your blog and that is what I am going to focus on – how to write a blog post which will bring lots of readers to your blog.

Hook them and keep them.

The definitions are out of the way and now we can focus on the meat of the issue. You want to write a fantastic post which will result in lots of visitors to your blog. There are three parts to achieving this goal:

• hook – the readers find your post
• sink – the readers find the post interesting
• liner – the readers spread the word about your post

All three parts are essential in order to create a great post. They work best if combined together. Thanks to the synergy their effectiveness reaches its maximum.

The hook

First you need to somehow put the post in front of as many eyeballs as possible. The way to catch the attention of your steady readers is to start with a good title and follow with a great opening. Attracting new readers who do not know yet about your blog is different; use the right keywords in the post so it gets picked up by the search engines, then apply a bit of SEO. You can also place the links to your post in relevant online forums. Be careful as this method works best if the post is truly connected to the issues discussed on the forum.

The sink

People are starting to read your post. Now you need to make sure they keep reading till the very end. You can guarantee this will happen by thinking of a topic and a goal for the post before you start writing it. Both the topic and the goal have to be crisp and clear. You cannot afford to confuse your readers. After you have the post content written it is absolutely crucial that you edit it – this step is essential if you want to end up with a great post. Some of the content will be thrown away during editing, this is normal and expected.

The liner

The readers like your post and feel good about having read it. You want them to tell other people about it, to spread the news. They will be more likely to do this if your post is in some way useful to them and if the content is still current. These types of posts will bring traffic to the whole blog over a long time not only for a short while. They’re known as Pilar Articles, Flagship Content or Cornerstone Content. Regardless of the name you chose for these posts they will be the workhorse of your blog. They will be linked to by other people and they will rank highly in the search engines. All these factors will contribute to bringing you more traffic.

The synergy

Use effectively all three parts of the process to end up with a wildly successful post. Perfection is rarely achieved the first time; you will get better if you do it again and again. You’re bound to hit it true. Happy and successful writing!

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First let me introduce the meaning of the title tags since while discussing the topic with LadyRostand we realized it’s not as clear as we thought. It all started in 1980 … – OK let’s not go back so far, even though the beginnings of HTML are really related to the matter at hand. The title tag is what your web browser displays in the title bar. It’s basically the title of the page. Big deal, you say, I knew that. Sure, it’s not a big deal, it’s rather simple. The big deal is that when Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine is indexing your page they pay big attention to this title. Why? The title is supposed to be a summary of your post. It’s not supposed to be witty or funny. It’s just a summary.

So if you write a post about installing an external USB enclosure you better give it a good Google friendly title tag. Like for example: “Enermax EB307S-B Jazz: installing external USB enclosure” rather than “That’s how I’ve learned to like Jazz”. Now the second one is funnier but Google has no sense of humor (quite a big shortcoming if you ask me) and it interprets the title tags rather literally. After seeing the title tag it will “make up its mind” about what should be the content of the page. If the page content doesn’t match it will lower your ranking in the search engine results. Why? How would you like to see a page about penguins (or more likely porn if you’re using the same Internet as I do) when you were searching for rabbits? See, if the search engines didn’t compare the page content with the page title they would allow pages to be ranked high for results to which they are not relevant. I think I’m mumbling here a bit. Basically it’s a technique to prevent or at least reduce web spam.

Back to the “That’s how I’ve learned to like Jazz” post. So far you know that the title tag as seen by the search engines should be relevant to the content of the post. It should be even devoid of articles and include relevant keywords. Now it starts to sound more like a super concentrated abstract. In fact, that’s what it is. The problem is that this super concentrated soup of keywords is not very human friendly and believe me you are really writing for humans not for search engines.

OK, so is there a way to have nice human friendly post titles where you can show off your wit and at the same time allow for high keyword concentration in the title tag? Yes, it’s possible. In fact, if you’re using Wordpress for your blog it’s just one plug-in away. The plug-in we’re using here at olivetalks is called SEO Title Tag. Once you install it you can have a separate post title for human consumption and a title tag to feed the search engines.

Installing SEO Title Tag plug-in is rather simple. First download it from this location. Then you need to unzip the file and upload the whole seo-title-tag directory to the wp-content/plugins directory of your blog. After that you activate the plug-in using Wordpress admin. The default options are just fine so you don’t need to change them. Editing the Header in Theme Editor is also unnecessary even though it’s included in the plug-in installation instructions.

With SEO Title Tag plug-in already installed you can now see “Title Tags” under “Manage” in the Wordpress admin. Here’s where you can quickly mass update the title tags of your existing posts. You can also do it by editing individual posts – you’ll notice a new field “Title Tag (optional)” which appears below “Save” button. The field “Title Tag (optional)” will also appear when you edit a new post.

In this post you can see that the title of the post (for humans) is different than the title which appears in the title bar (for search engines). So now everybody is well fed… and happy.

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