Corporate Blogging By Any Other Name – Not as Sweet in Search: Part One

Before you sneak a glance at their nametags, their faces are going to be the first thing you notice about strangers at a party or networking meeting.  With business blogs, by contrast, there’s no getting away from it – the titles are going to be the first thing readers (and search engines, for that matter) are going to encounter.

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I appreciate getting my paper copy of the Indianapolis Star delivered to my door every morning.  To illustrate a couple of important points about elements Indianapolis blog writers ought to include in the titles of business blog posts, I chose three headlines from the August 4th issue of the Star.

Let me explain, first off, that as a professional ghost blogger and corporate blogging trainer, I don’t deal in what Seth Godin would call “cat blogs” and “boss blogs”, only in viral blogs.  I call viral blogs SEO marketing blogs, which are created to help search engines connect the blog to strangers who have a need for information about specific products or services.

Here’s the first Indianapolis Star headline:

“Insurance Will Help Rescue Farmers”
(The article shows the effect the drought continues to have on farmers and consumers.)

The good thing about this title is that it makes clear what readers can expect to find in the article.  From a business blog content writer’s point of view, specifying “crop insurance” would be more focused, as would saying “Indiana farmers”.  Of course, the Star isn’t “marketing” anything here. But, were this a business blog offered by, say, a seed company or agricultural commodities investment firm, the title could be used to target Indiana farmers.

One of the main motivators for having an SEO marketing blog in the first place is to “get found” by the ‘right people”. (Who are those? People already interested in what you have to sell, what you know, and what you know how to do.)

Blog titles can be really important stuff. That’s because titles have a triple function – engage readers, offer an overview of the topic of the post, and incorporate keyword phrases to attract search engine matches.
 

At Say It For You, we know there’s nothing old-fashioned about carefully crafting the title of each business blog post!