How to optimize your headlines for search engines as well as your readers

Interesting Headline

Headlines are one of the most important part of your webpages, blog posts and articles. They are the essence of exactly what you’re trying to communicate to your readers. In conventional media you can have a free run with your headlines as long as they make sense and make the right impact. On the Internet, along with striking the right tone with your readers you also have to convince the search engine algorithms that you are on right track.

When it comes to your search engine rankings your headlines can be a big deal. Your headline must have your primary keyword and it should also sound quite compelling. It should convey exactly what you are offering, most convincingly. The problem is, sometimes it is not possible to create a highly innovative and creative headline without making a compromise at the search engine optimization front.

As a content writer I wouldn’t say that it would be difficult for me to create a compelling headline without making it search engine unfriendly but there can be many instances, especially when how you present your headlines can have a big impact on how many people come to your blog or website and read your message.

Your headline can be different from your page title

Herein lies your solution. This is especially possible when you’re using WordPress to run your website or blog. The title of your blog doesn’t necessarily have to be the title of your webpage. Ain’t clear what I’m talking about?

Normally when you look at the source code of a web page or blog post look at two places

Text appearing between <TITLE> and </TITLE>
Text appearing between <h1> and </h> (or whatever tag you are using to display your main headline)

In most of the cases both the places have the same text.

Using the latest features in WordPress and other content management solutions, you can have separate text for the title tag and the headline portion.

Click to enlarge

For instance, in WordPress if you install an SEO plug-in (in most of the cases it is All in One Seo Pack) you can have a different headline and a different title for the same blog post or web page.

Let’s see an example:

For readers: Let sleeping policemen lie
For search engines: Sleeping policeman, when awakened, hits an old woman in Bangalore

So for readers it would be amusing to draw a parallel between the sleeping policemen and the old adage “let sleeping dogs lie” but for the search engines you are including in the title all the keywords required – “sleeping policeman”, “when awakened”, “hits an old woman” and “in Bangalore”.

How to bring conversation back to blogging

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Today in the afternoon I came across this blog post in which the author asks, “Have conversations left blogging?”

It’s a pertinent question. Blogs are as much about engagement as they are about content. A big reason why blogging flourished was the readers’ ability to participate in the thought process. In some instances a blog post containing just a few paragraphs would attract 100s of comments. In fact there used to be so many comments that plug-ins and widgets were created to paginate the commenting section.

What happened then?

I don’t think much has happened. I don’t agree that it is the end of conversation and engagement in blogging and I don’t believe, as many do, that “blogging craze” is ebbing. Of course with the onset of social media people’s focus has shifted to other, I would say quicker, forms of expression, but people who were seriously blogging a couple of years ago, are still seriously blogging and they still have a serious audience.

Nonetheless, engagement has gone down and that’s because people’s desire to express themselves and to be a part of a community is being taken care of by Facebook and Twitter and other such social networking websites.

But it doesn’t mean that audience cannot be engaged on blogs. Create engaging content. Create content that makes people want to interact with you there and then. Stop publishing the same old topics that you were talking about last year. Even if the topics are same, as I talked in this blog post titled “How to help your business stand out with unique content”, you can always give them a new twist to make people interested in them.

Aside from that you can also focus on plug-ins and add-ons that bring features like Facebook and Twitter right into your blogging. For instance, some blogs like TechCrunch allow their visitors to leave comments using their Facebook accounts rather than having to create separate accounts.

Similarly we can have some applications that can incorporate Twitter interface right into blogging platforms so people can use their Twitter accounts to interact on blogs.

Why there is more conversation on Facebook and Twitter and less on blogs?

First, it’s the audience. If you have 2000 followers on Twitter you know that whenever you post something it is going to be seen by most of your followers. I know this is a misconception but this is the psychology behind the thinking. On a blog on the other hand, people wonder how many are going to see the comment. On the contrary your comments experience more exposure on blogs rather than on Twitter and Facebook.

There is another thing: a big motivation behind leaving comments on various blogs used to be backlinks. When you left comments on other blogs you created backlinks to your own blog and this was known to help your search engine rankings. Then search engines like Google stopped attributing benefits to this exercise and this impacted commenting adversely.

So now even if quantity has decreased the quality of commenting has certainly gone up because people leave comments to add value to the ongoing discussion rather than simply to get a backlink.

Surviving the Google Penguin update with quality content

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Google Penguin Update

Eventually it’s your quality of content that saves the day no matter what changes take place in various search engine algorithms. Take for instance the recent changes at Google, code named “Penguin”: many websites have gone off the search engine’s radar and have been relegated to back pages from top 10 results in a matter of a few hours.

After the update broadly there are 4 categories of people/websites:

Those who have been adversely affected by the update losing rankings for some or all keywords
Those who have experienced no effect whatsoever
Those who have been favorably affected and hence experienced a marked improvement in their search engine rankings
Those who are not at all concerned whether Google favors them or not

Regarding the first category either they have been found to violate Google’s guidelines or they have gotten trapped in the loop of “collateral damage”.

People belonging to the second category must have consciously or unconsciously followed Google guidelines.

The third category people might be those who were following all Google guidelines but somehow weren’t getting the sort of attention they deserved.

The fourth category, is quite indicative.

Whatever category you may belong to, the key is, knowing, vis-a-vis, your content and its organization, where you are and where you want to be.

Mainly depending on search engines can be a tricky business. They can be quite whimsical, big companies as they are, and they will do whatever suits them – and it’s fair enough.

The answer of course is creating content that is highly valuable, relevant and helpful. Focus on your readers rather than your search engine rankings. Keep in mind that whenever you tailor your content according to search engine guidelines your rankings are going to go topsy-turvy the moment they change their guidelines. I mean, who can guarantee that Google is not going to change its guidelines in the next couple of years.

So the best thing to do is, build your traffic on the strength of your content. Create content in such a manner that neither search engines nor people can ignore it.

This is a topic that I have tried to cover in my guest blog post at the Content Marketing Institute blog titled “How to Survive the Google Penguin Update With Effective Content Writing”.

A list of my favorite digital tools these days

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I often say that tools don’t make you productive, YOU make you productive. Take a small example, has there been an author of the stature of people like Tolstoy and Dickens in the times of desktop and cloud-based wordprocessors? Just imagine, they could manage 1000s of handwritten papers using pens and quills they repeatedly had to dip into the ink pot.

Recently I came across this piece of text that beautifully summarizes the absence of a parity between quality of tools and productivity:

Back in the 60s and 70s the computers were as strong as today’s smart phones. They sent manned missions to the moon with the same processing power, and we are hitting pigs with birds.

No, really I’m not bashing tools and technology, I’m just saying that using multiple tools doesn’t make you productive. You become productive when you really want to be productive and it’s only then these tools are useful to you.

With that bit out of my way now I will talk about some digital tools that are helping me organize my information in a better way and become more productive in the process. You might already be aware of these tools but I am sharing them here just to talk about how I am using them.

Evernote

I have been using Evernote off and on for the past four years I think but it’s only now for the past 6-8 months I have been really using it. By really using I mean if all of a sudden they start charging me a reasonable fee (something that I can afford) I will gladly pay.

As you know you can save your notes and all sort of information in Evernote. You can create different notebooks and within those notebooks you can create different notes. So I have created different notebooks for

Keeping client-related information: All the information my clients send me I keep them in these notes. This includes company information, all the vital details that I must keep in mind while preparing their content and associated bits of information like e-mail ids, reference URLs and all the research information I gather while working on their project.
Collecting blogging ideas: Whenever I come across a blogging idea I add it to a note I have specifically created for this task.
Preserving clips from the web: There is lots of information that you cannot capture in text files – it is a mix of images and text. I can simply clip the information from the webpages and save it as a note in Evernote.
Maintaining a diary: This is something that I have been planning to start for a very long time. Back in college days I used to have a diary but somewhere I lost touch with the habit. I have again picked it up. I have created a diary notebook. Now all I have to do is create a new note, give it a heading (I don’t have too) and start entering my day’s briefings. Since all the notes are automatically sorted by date I don’t have to worry about the sequence.
Domestic “things to remember”: For instance, just in the morning my father phoned and said that they haven’t received their electricity bill for the past two months. I asked his consumer ID, went to the power company’s website and took the printout of the latest bill. So that I don’t have to ask for the consumer ID again I have saved it to a notebook I have specifically created for such trivia.
Writing my next book: Along with notebooks you can also create stacks in Evernote. So I have created a “Book Writing” stack and within that stack I have created notebooks like “Chapters”, “Characters” and “Random Notes”.

Aside from an ability to arrange and preserve information in such a manner that it can be quickly retrieved, I can access all my information across my devices such as my computer, my laptop and my Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Dropbox

Dropbox Ever since I started using Dropbox I’m saving all my client files in that folder. If you don’t know what it is, it is a cloud-based drive hosting service with a desktop interface. So once you have signed up, you can download an application that creates a separate folder for the cloud-based drive and whenever you save something in it it is automatically synchronised. Aside from the fact that your important files are safe from hard disk crashes, you can access your files from anywhere provided you have an Internet connection. When you sign up, you get 2 GB of free space but you can get more free space by getting your friends and colleagues to sign up via your referral URL.

Pocket

It was formerly known as “Read It Later” and frankly I never used the service then. I don’t know what was lacking but when they recently launched it as “Pocket” I started using it. In fact I know why I didn’t use it back then – I didn’t have a tablet.

My main utility for the tool is that all the articles and blog posts that I want to read but cannot read at that time because I’m working, I can just click the “Pocket It” bookmark on my browser and they are automatically saved under my account. Then at night, when I’m in my bed, I can log on to my account through my Galaxy Tab and access all the blog posts and articles I have saved in there. And the best thing is, the sidebars, the header and the footer are stripped away and you get to read just the content.

Google Docs

All my content writing work these days happens on Google Docs. Even for clients who prefer to receive their work in MS Word files I prepare the documents first in Google Docs and then download them as Word files.

Most people who use Google Docs prefer the service for its collaboration features – multiple authors can work on a single document while maintaining multiple versions. I started using it simply because it keeps saving the work simultaneously as you type. You don’t ever have to worry about saving your file. I have been using Google Docs for the past two years now and I have never lost a single document since then.

Of course there is an added advantage that I’m now no longer tied down to a single computer. Wherever I am, I just need to log on and start writing. I have also gotten used to writing with bare minimum features. Again, I can also access my documents using my tablet.

FreshBooks

It is a service I have just started using a couple of months ago when I switched over to an hourly rate. I have known about the service for many years but never used it. Now it has become an integral part of my work. I not only track my clients’ work I also track my own time while working on my own website and other marketing activities. If you don’t know what is FreshBooks it’s an online time tracking and invoicing service.

Astrid Tasks

Astrid Tasks It is a task management tool. I first started using it on my Android phone and later on also started using it via the Google Chrome browser. It is the best task management tool I have come across so far. Before that I was using Remember the Milk but it is not as good as Astrid. It has everything you need to manage and track your work-related as well as personal tasks. Of course it has a great interface too.

Although there are many tools and services that I use almost every day, they are not a part of my “real” work. The tools listed above actually help me be more productive and manage my work well.

Are there some digital tools that are your favorite? Please share them in the comments section but just keep in mind they need to be some things that really help you be more professionally efficient.

You have published a new blog post. Great. But what now?

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I can totally relate to the overwhelming sense of achievement when you manage to write a complete blog post and then publish it after fully optimizing it and using the right images. But you know what, this does not ensure good visibility and exposure, whether it is search engines or social media/networking websites.

Once you have a new blog post you need to let the world know about it. Search engine optimizing is one way, of course. If you have a fully optimized blog post the search engines are bound to rank it well once they have indexed it. Is it that simple? With tough competition from legitimate as well as a illegitimate content, you stand little chance getting targeted traffic no matter how great your blog post is.

So what do you do to spread the word around? Many things actually? Some of them are:

Fill up all the Seo details like the title tag, description and keywords. By installing the All in One Seo Pack can give you lots of extra power, for instance having a different page title and a different blog headline.
Do a keyword analysis. With all the Google Penguin update confusions your confidence might be a bit shaken vis-a-vis using keywords, but they are still important. So make sure you have used the right keywords in your blog post and edit it if need be.
Post your new link on Twitter and Facebook (you have Twitter and Facebook accounts, right?)
Sort out your syndication. Make sure your XML and RSS feeds are updated.
Send an e-mail notification. You should definitely build a mailing list (this is not to be done after publishing the latest blog post – it is an ongoing activity) so that whenever you publish a new blog post you can send an e-mail notification to all your subscribers.

This blog post actually lists 12 things you can do (it’s an older blog post but I just came across it) after publishing your new blog post. You can use the things mentioned in this blog post as a checklist, although you should definitely have your own checklist too.