In response to a comment left by Lin of "Telling It Like It Is" and the anticipation expressed by Troy of "The Free Website Project", I'm providing you with my personal guide to proper post titles.
The reason I'm calling it a personal guide is because proper post titles are as unique as the articles or posts they represent. Therefore, my guide is not for everyone; it's only for those who don't have a clue to what they're doing. What may be proper for me may not be proper for you.
Conveying the Correct Message
A title, of any kind of media, is the first message you're sending to the viewer. In the world of blogging, it's extremely imported to convey the correct message. If you're writing about how to get rid of common dandruff, your post title should convey that message. A post title like "Dandruff Sucks and it Itches" wouldn't convey the proper intent of the article, now would it?
Using Keywords and Key Phrases
There are two ways to formulate a post title. You can create the title before you write the article or you can create the title afterward. Which way you do it is a personal choice and it should be whichever is easiest for you.
As I've probably mentioned more than once (and no, I won't bother to go look for it), keywords and key phrases not only make your text eminently more readable, they'll make your post title and article rank higher in the search engines if both the post title and the article share them. The secret is to not overuse them (something I've been guilty of on occasion). I learned this technique from Grizzly of "How to Make Money Online for Beginners".
Read the first paragraph of this article and then read the last paragraph. "Personal guide" and "proper post titles" are keywords repeated from the post title. "A" and "to" are merely connecting words.
Sleuthing is NOT an Option for Your Readers
Post titles shouldn't require detective work to figure out exactly what they mean. Regardless of what language you write in, write the post title the way you would say it in that language. Don't use any kind of slang or colloquialism unless you're absolutely positive that all of the readers that speak your language will understand what you mean by it.
When I wrote how to produce quality content, I didn't mention a word about the post titles. I was focusing on the main content and it was intentional. The post title for that article, however, didn't require the services of Sherlock Holmes (a popular fictional detective) to figure out what the content would provide.
Deceptive Post Titles
While it may work once or twice, creating deceptive post titles will cause most readers to leave and never return. That isn't your goal, is it? Deceptive post titles are titles that are intentionally either misleading or completely false. For humor posts, it will sometimes work better than you want it to.
I'll give you a perfect example, but I won't link to it here. You can check through my archives and find it. It stands out like a sore thumb (hint: cats). It's intentionally false, even though the title is correct. Some of you may have already been caught by it.
While you can get away with surreptitiously including words or even a links (like I did a few times above) in the post content, you can't do that in a post title because it'll instantly look out of place. While the content of the title may be correct, it will read like a spam nightmare.
Final Thoughts
While this isn't a 100 percent complete guide, it points out the common problems I see with post titles. The best post titles are short, succinct and convey the intended message at first glance. Stuffing keywords/phrases into long titles will most likely have the opposite of the intended effect, not to mention that feedreaders and social site listings tend to replace parts of a long title with an ellipsis ("…"), defeating part of the purpose.
Can you think of things to add, that I didn't cover already, to my personal guide to proper post titles? I'm sure I've missed a few.
But often cryptic titles can be annoying as well.
