Best Practices for Choosing Blog Post Titles

Few elements in a blog post hold as much importance as the title. This is what visitors first see upon viewing your post, and it’s also what search engines display in their listings. But how exactly do you craft good post titles?

Here are some best practices to follow when choosing titles:

Use Title Case

When crafting titles for your blog posts, it’s recommended that you use title case format. Basically, this involves capitalizing the first letter of the first word, as well as the first letter of all major words. Smaller words (e.g. articles and prepositions) should be left all lower case.  If this sounds too confusing, just enter your post title into http://www.titlecase.com/ and it will automatically convert it into title case.

55 Character Limit

According to the search optimization and Internet marketing experts at Moz, Google typically displays 50-60 characters of a page’s title. Therefore, it’s best to keep your blog post titles within this limit to ensure a high level of visibility. Moz says that limiting your titles to 55 characters will ensure that 95% of them are displayed properly. You may still use post titles that are longer than 55-60 characters, although it’s unlikely that Google will display the complete titles in its search index.

Include Keywords

Of course, you should also include relevant keywords in your post titles. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should stuff post titles with keywords for the sake of SEO purposes, but rather include relevant keywords that help convey the meaning of the blog post to visitors and search engines. If you need help choosing high-traffic, relevant keywords for your post titles, play around with Google’s Adwords Keyword Planner tool. This free-to-use tool will reveal competition, traffic, and even average bid prices for keywords and related keywords.

Need Ideas? Try The Post Title Generator Tool.

Another excellent tool that bloggers shouldn’t overlook is the Hubspot Blog Topic Generator. As the name suggests, this tool will automatically generate blog topics based on the keywords you provide. Just enter a couple relevant keywords, click “GIVE ME TOPICS!” and it does the rest. Keep in mind, however, that this tool isn’t perfect, and it should only be used as a reference to help guide you.

There are plenty of other ways to come up with titles for your blog posts, including browsing your competitors’ sites to see what they are doing. Obviously you shouldn’t copy their titles, but rather look to see how their titles are structured. Entering this search query in Google “site:competitorssite.com” will reveal indexed pages of the respective website, allowing you to see dozens or even hundreds of titles.

Have any other tips for choosing blog post titles that you would like to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section below!