

When writing blog post titles, forget about SEO - stritar
http://stritar.net/Post/Note-to-self-when-writing-blog-post-titles-forget-about-SEO.aspx

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halo18
"Search engine rankings are influenced mostly by (social media) backlinks."

Hilarious.

Also - cramming a keyword you want into a title tag that doesn't fit the
content is shitty SEO. There's a difference between that, and doing it well.

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xpose2000
Completely agree with you. If this post had a downvote button I would surely
use it. Very very bad advice in his post that is just flat out wrong.

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regal
Despite dispensing SEO advice so freely, the site's current SEM Rush daily
traffic is 0 visitors / day. And the author's been blogging on this site for
over 3 years; it's not a new site.

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petecampbell
I'm sorry but you have a few details wrong in this post.

If you're concerned about referencing keywords, you could do it in body copy
as opposed to the post title.

Also, rankings are largely influenced by the number of sites linking to a
post, alongside on-page keyword references, well-built sites and user
experience. Social signals are just a catalyst - not a direct factor.

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pknight
I'm sorry, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Stay current with
what is going on, SEOMOZ and SearchEngineLand are good sources.

And btw, the core message in his post is very good one. Lots of people are
convinced they need to optimize their titles to death for greater SEO success.
Tools like Yoast's SEO plugin for WordPress and WP Scribe encourage that kind
of boxed idea of SEO. Especially newcomers just get confused by this. If you
create content people want to read and share, they will increase the ranking
factors of your page. It starts with a good title. I'd say the social factor
is a direct a factor can get when it comes to raising search engine
visibility.

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WillyF
What about the parent comment indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking
about?

Here are some Matt Cutts quotes from two weeks ago:

"Over time, Google will care more about identity and social reputation."

"Links still have many, many good years ahead of them."

"We like standards that are available on the open web. If we’re not able to
crawl something – like Facebook or like the time we temporarily ran into
problems with Twitter – we don’t want to depend on that data."

It's pretty obvious that Google is taking a very slow approach to mixing in
social signals. They want Google+ to be THE social signal, and that isn't
close to happening yet. Social can be a great way to build links, but calling
I definitely would not call it a direct factor at this point.

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pknight
Links are important, naturally. When they are coming organically as a direct
result of social engagement, even better. You're more likely to get social
engagement if you don't compromise the human readable title and content for
the sake of SEO.

But quotes like these >> rankings are largely influenced by the number of
sites linking to a post are very inaccurate and wouldn't come from someone who
is keeping up to date with SEO. You can have tens of thousands of links and it
could actually be hurting your SEO, which is why some sites are scrambling to
take down links just to recover.

It's also worth noting that you can go crazy with on-page factors, having the
perfect post slug, the right keyword density, keyword rich anchor text,
descriptive meta descriptions, no-follow links, a limited amount of links on
the page etc and it can end up biting you in the butt: overoptimizing can hurt
your google rankings. The message coming from Google is pretty clear: create
high quality content and make it accessible, don't get too clever with SEO.
They will only get better at incorporating social signals into their rankings.

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salvadors
>> _it's every blogger's dream his / her work will once be self-sustainable.
Traffic without active (social media) involvement. I do the writing, Google
does its magic, the readers to the rest._

Weird writing/typos aside, I find this concept confusing. What does it mean
for writing to be self-sustainable?

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TomAnthony
Site struggling. Cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:stritar...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:stritar.net%2FPost%2FNote-
to-self-when-writing-blog-post-titles-forget-about-SEO.aspx)

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danso
>> _" But I've chosen the wrong title for it, since the core of every UX
analysis are the problems and goals each solution is trying to solve and
achieve. By thinking about SEO, I've devalued the content of the story by
presenting it as something it is not."_

So the OP is not saying ditch SEO in favor of verbosity/cleverly-punny-vague
titles, he's saying, don't write blog titles full of bullshit buzzwords.

Thanks for the insight.

