A Business Blog By Any Other Name

Shakespeare’s Juliet asked “What’s in a name?”, and the playwright supplied an answer -“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But would it? Do names matter?

Each year, the Social Security Administration publishes a list of the most popular baby names. Ten years ago, for example, parents were naming their boys Aiden, Jayden, and Ethan. (As of last year, the favorites were Liam, Noah, and William.) A decade ago, girls were being called Emma, Olivia, Ava, and Isabelle (Today the favorites still include Emma.)

One objective in business blogging is winning search, so what you “name” your post, in terms of both its title and the meta description (the 160-character snippets that appear on the search engine page), can matter a lot.

LocationRebel.com lists different approaches content writers can take in “naming” their posts, including:

Guides
Start to finish guide….
Advanced guide to….
An in-depth guide to….

Where, What, Why
Here’s why….
What you can learn from…

The simple…
A simple strategy for….
…ing made simple…

At Say It for You, I often speak about “Huh?” and “Oh!” names for blog posts. The “Huh?s” need subtitles to make clear what the post is about. “Oh!s” titles are self-explanatory. The “Huh?s” are there to startle and arouse curiosity. The subtitle than clarifies what the focus of the piece will actually be. Ideally, the name of the product or service is inserted into the “Oh!” part of the title.

A blog post by any other name might “read as sweet”, but the function of the title is to get them reading in the first place!