Good WordPress Titles Search Engines vs. Readers


How do you write a good WordPress title?

I was involved in an interesting discussion this week over a blog entry that I had written. It was about the stock markets and I used surfing as an example of how the Stock Market tends to  move in waves and how those waves are different every day and how the same can be said for the surf in the ocean.  The title to my piece was “Shredding this Market”.  While my writing is timeless, the content that I write about in the financial world has the life-span of usefulness of about a nano-second.  My writing is related to what  the market has done and what I think will happen in the very near future.    It isn’t long before that future is past and the article is only useful for validation of my skills. This particular article had some references to an indicator that traders use and actually had some longer-term tutorial usefulness.  A mixed temporal piece.

My goal for the piece was to get readers to open it, today, right now.  The link was delivered to readers via Twitter, RSS, WordPress homepages, and emails.  I thought “Shredding this Market” would get readers to click on the title out of interest and I thought I was being very clever using the surfer analogy with surfer slang.  I also have a style that my readers expect.

An editor suggested we add the acronym ATR (the name of the indicator) to the title and I just nodded, yea, sure.  Then the site manger spoke up and said that it was not going to rank very high in search engines and we should think about changing the name.  That had me thinking about the strategy of titles.  My strategy was to be clever and get readers to wonder what Marlin had written about today. That is a different strategy than writing an article about the ATR indicator and showing traders how to use it.   What I should have is a page on my trading site, a WordPress page that has a search engine optimized (SEO) title like: Using the ATR (Average True Range) indicator for day-trading, and making sure that my blog piece referenced that more strategic search engine piece.   A link from a good blog piece to the more static piece would help raise the authority on that static piece.  The goal being that I want my site to be number one on the search engine list for ATR. I want to own that word.  On that static page, there should be a list of blog posts about using the ATR, the shredding piece being one.  With that setup I have a tight, well organized structure that should rate well with the search engines, but more importantly, serve the readers who might want to learn more than the blog post had about the ATR or those that came to the site via a search to begin to read some of my blog posts and learn that I really am clever.