Having a good title such as “duke” or “baron” meant everything in 18th century England.  According to Jacob Appel of Writer’s Digest, for fiction writers, choosing the right title for a book is just as crucial.

As part of corporate blogging training, I teach business blog content writers they have to address both readers and search engines in their choice of title for each blog post.

One day each week, I tutor in the Writing Lab at Ivy Tech Community College. I find my students have difficulty, when planning an essay, knowing the difference between the topic of a paper and its thesis. Suppose they were instructed to write about graduation cap tassels.  That’s the topic.  But what about tassels?  Are they silly? Important? Should we hold on to that tradition? (The answer is the thesis, or the “slant” the paper will take.) The title of their essay, I explain, needs to convey both the topic and the thesis.

What if the headline for a blog post were “Blog Titles”, posits brickmarketing.com.  That headline doesn’t sound interesting and also doesn’t really convey what the post will be about. (It has no thesis.)  Blog post titles might include “Learn How To… “, “Best practices for…” , or “Two Reasons Why Blog Writing Works,” brickmarketing advises, so the readers can be assured of gaining some benefit by reading the post.

Writer’s Digest’s Jacob Appel offers three tips to writers to help them craft strong titles that are “distinctive, yet not distracting”. Each of these can be applied to the efforts of Indianapolis freelance blog content writers:

Google it.  To ensure you have an original title, simple Google it, says Appel.
In business blogs, keyword research is one important part of the “prep” for optimizing the blog title.

Don’t forget voice and point of view. “If you’re writing a story in third person, don’t call it “My Summer Vacation”.
Translated into business blogging terms, this means setting the tone for each blog post in its title – readers should be able to discern if this post will be humorous, sarcastic, informative, or emotional – “What will I find if I click?”

Craft Two Meanings. “Most readers consider your title twice – once before they read your work, again after they finish…Successful titles gain hidden meanings after the book is read.”
In blog content writing, that new insight effect can be amplified with a “tie-back” last sentence that recaps the main theme of the post. (See the following paragraph for an example of a tie-back.)
 

Having a good title such as “duke” or “baron” was important in 18th century England, Today, for blog content writers, choosing the right title for each post can be just as crucial!

“A trade-off exists between brevity and detail,” Brandon Royal explains in the Little Red Writing Book. Sufficient detail will make a piece of writing longer, he adds, but “examples and details are the very things people remember long after reading a piece.” Specific, descriptive words, he advises, make for more forceful writing. http://www.brandonroyal.com/thelittleredwritingbook/index1.html

Specific and descriptive working makes for more powerful business blog content writing, too. As a corporate blogging trainer, that’s something I need to stress to beginning bloggers. Corporate websites provide basic information about a company’s products or a professional’s services, but the business blog content is there to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to that information by filling in the finer details. And it’s those very details, more than any list of professional credentials or corporate accomplishments, which end up winning the hearts of online readers.
http://blog.sayitforyou.net/blog/ghost-blogger/artisan-chocolates-are-better-for-blogs
So, what about keeping SEO marketing blog posts short? Each post, I teach, should contain a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of the business or practice. After all, readers come online searching for information, products, or services, and they are not going to take the time to read the full text of even a relatively short blog post) without assurance that they’ve come to the right place. That’s why teach new freelance blog writers in Indianapolis to address readers’ “What’s-In-It-For-Me?” questions at the beginning, rather than later on in each post.
That’s precisely where the tradeoff between brevity and detail comes in. We need “close-ups” for emotional connection and impact, and our challenge is that “close-ups” use up more words. Brandon Royal suggests a compromise that can be very useful for business owners’ and professional practitioners’ blogs: Keeping individual sentences short helps us in the brevity department, while adding other, short sentences to fill in the details helps with emotional impact.

Short, but not terse, brief, yet filled with impactful detail. Whoever said effective blog content writing was going to be an easy task?