Dear Rich,

I’ve read that I should load my blog titles with targeted keywords to increase my blog’s search engine visibility. However, sometimes I just want to use a clever turn of phrase, or a slightly irreverent title that is appropriate for the blog post, but maybe not for Google.

How do I balance my needs to rank well at the search engines with my desire to put my BA in English to use?

Titling in Thomaston

Dear Titling,

I would argue that you don’t need to sacrifice your cleverness to create a keyword-rich title tag for your blog.

Here’s how you create titles that work for your search engine optimization and your end user:

My favorite technique for creating quality titles that pull in search engine results is to start with my keywords, add a colon, and then rephrase my title, perhaps being more clever the second time around.

This is what business books do all the time:

• Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
• All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World by Seth Godin

So, a post on jalapeños for your cooking blog might be: Jalapeño Recipes: Hot Stuff Coming Through! A post on hiring the right person might read: Hiring Tactics: Do Skills Trump Passion?

Also, if you have a WordPress blog (like flyte’s web marketing blog) you could install an SEO plugin like All In One SEO. By default, most blog platforms (like WordPress or TypePad) take the title of your blog post and make that your page title.

All In One SEO allows you to create a page title that’s independent of your blog post title. This plugin has a space below each post you create that you can craft your SEO title (as well as add a description and keywords):

This will allow you to target your audience at the search engines with a keyword-rich page title, all without giving up that clever blog title that will show up above your post.

And who said that concentration in English literature wouldn’t come in handy?

Rich Brooks
Clever to a Fault

Rich,

I’ve noticed that I have a very high bounce rate on my blog. What would cause such a high bounce rate and how can I lower it?

Bouncing in Bethel

Dear Bouncing,

First off, for those readers who aren’t familiar with the term “bounce rate,” it’s a metric in Google Analytics for measuring the percentage of people who visit only one page on your site or blog before exiting.

I feel blogs will always have higher bounce rates than websites, as very often people are just visiting to read your most recent post. Even if they subscribe to your blog via RSS or email at that point, it will still probably count as a bounce since many subscription methods will take them off site or process their request without requiring them to visit another page.

If you are monetizing your blog with ads or affiliate links, then a high bounce rate may reflect that people are clicking on those affiliate and ad links, which is good news for your bottom line.

If you have a lead generation blog (like the flyteblog), where you’re using your blog to increase your search engine visibility and funnel that traffic to your website, e-commerce site or other online property, then a high bounce rate may be demonstrating that your tactics are effective!

In short, I wouldn’t use bounce rate as a leading indicator of how effective your blog is; visits, repeat visitors, subscribers, search volume and other metrics are going to be much more important to your business overall.

If you are still concerned about your bounce rate, you’ll need to find ways of leading visitors from one post to another. One tool that could help is the Yet Another Related Post Plugin (for WordPress.) It will find 5 related posts from your blog and create links to each one…that can help both your search engine visibility as well as your audience, as they will discover other quality content that relates to the post they’re currently reading.

Rich Brooks
Business Blogger

I got some good feedback over the Interwebs last week for my post on How Do People Find My Blog? Turns out a lot of people had the same question.

So, I expanded the topic to include some other blogging questions I often hear, including:

• How do I make my blog more search engine optimized?
• How often should I blog?
• How long should my posts be?

and a few more.

Whether you’ve been blogging for a while, or if you’re just getting started, you might find some helpful advice in Business Blog FAQ: Blogging Secrets Revealed! (Was the trailing exclamation point too much?)

Rich Brooks
Blogger!