How to title articles and blog posts for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

There is an interesting article over at news.com about the increasing necessity for newspapers to use search engine optimization techniques when titling articles.

A basic summary of the article is as follows:
1) Newspaper websites rely on search engines for traffic.
2) Journalists take pride in intelligent titles for their articles.
3) Search engines have difficulty interpreting the meaning of
witty/humorous article titles, and therefore rank them lower on results
pages.
4) Pressure is therefore being put on journalists to simplify their
article titles to increase the newspaper’s search engine placement.

Whether you are writing for the newspaper, a blog, a press release
or a web page, the same issue applies. In the new media world, how do
you maintain a balance between creativity and utility?

One method is to double-title your articles/blog posts: one title
for humans, and one for search engines. It’s almost a light version of
keyword-stuffing, the old technique to get to the top of Altavista’s
search engine. Double-titling means changing both your web page’s file
name and title tag to a specific search phrase for SEO purposes, while
using a different human-readable title in the actually body of the
webpage.

Double-titling doesn’t always work with blogs and other content
management systems (CMS) though, as they automatically set your
document title tag and file name to the title of your article.

While some blogging software offer plugins
which enable this functionality, there are workaround: you can use
search engine optimized keywords as your article title, and then use a
sub-title as the first line of your post for humans to read. The end
result is basically what you see at my blog – two to three word titles,
with a subtitle right below it expanding on its meaning.

Although not a perfect solution, double-titling can significantly
increase the amount of traffic your webpage receives from search
engines. When double-titling, be cautious of “stuffing” your website
with keywords - search engines have been known to penalize that.