Writing a good post it difficult enough but deciding the title of your article is even harder.
“Titles are the most difficult writing in the whole book! Start thinking now of a title that will give a clue to your story and will intrique agents, editors, and, we hope, readers. Make it short.” – Ann Rule, from Writing Mysteries
After reflecting on what Ann Rule said, I could not agree more. However, it is different when we are talking about blogs rather than books. With blogs, there are other factors you need to take into account, search engines such as Google for instance (i hate google but i could not live without it either, sigh..).
Having an interesting title will, without a doubt, win your readers’ first impression and will definitely urge them to read the full article, however, it will then make your article’s title less optimized for SEO. Having a keyword-rich title, on the other hand, would definitely help you boost your article to the top of the search results allowing it to reach more readers.
Having to make such decision is a pain in the neck but we have to face the envitable. Sometimes we are lucky enough to hit two birds in one stone (this post for example) but most of the time we have to choose only one. As for myself, I choose to give my article the right title it deserves. A good title doesn’t have to be a non-SEO title it is probably just less SEO optimized as it should be and you article’s content can just fill in the gap, after all it is all about the readers and not Search engines.