There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to making a headline for each of your blog posts.  One, you can make your headline catch attention and draw interest to the post itself.  Two, you can make a search-engine friendly headline that contains key words.

Or, you can tell both of these schools you’re not enrolling and instead do BOTH at once.

See, with keywords in your posts, you’ll draw the search engines in but your readers won’t be as engaged.  A post titled “The Oreck XL 350″ really doesn’t get the interest the way “This Vacuum Cleaner Really Sucks” does.  The other way around switches the terms–no search engine is going to return a lot of hits for “So, Guess Who Got Engaged?” even though your readers will likely be scrolling down just to see what the answer is.

One good way to split this difference is to do both at once.  For instance, in the above examples, you can split the difference by trying:

“The Oreck XL 350: A Vacuum Cleaner That Really Sucks”.

or

“So, Guess Who’s Getting Engaged?  Hint: It’s Not Gerard Butler.”

Now what you’ve done is added both a keyword to bait the search engines and an interesting aside for your readers.

Your readers are valuable, but you always need more of them.  So don’t forget to work both sides of the fence, whether by expanding your headlines or by varying the style.

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