There are so many channels to market your blog these days. Initially if you weren’t successful on the search engines you weren’t successful at all. Now you can get thousands of visitors from social networking sites and have a hugely successful site, while getting relatively few visitors from google. Needless to say the more you target the better. Here is an overview of the ways to target each one and a few ideas how to combine all three.

How To Write Headlines For Google

I recommend you have a read of How To Dial In Your Keywords before you write your next Google headline. The first 5 or so words are the most important in a Google headline. So make sure your headline features the keywords near the start.

Although having the right keywords will get you in front of potential visitors you still need to get them to click! Have alook at How To Write Article Titles For Traffic for tips on writing catchy headlines.

When targeting Google remember you can also add a description (Use the All In One SEO plugin to write a custom description. The default is the first 160 characters of your post). The description should include the keywords and also make the reader even more interested. Leading text and dramatic claims (if you can back them up) are good in the description.

How To Write Headlines For Digg

Headlines for digg are all about reader appeal. Having a great headline will draw in more readers and thus more diggs and thus more readers. Its a great cycle but it all starts with the headline. Digg also has descriptions like google. Keep the description relevant, short and sweet.

Digg and other social bookmarking sites have a search function that gets used by some users. So although keywords are fairly insigniciant compared to Google, I would reccomend you still drop in the kewyord somewhere.

How To Write Headlines From Twitter

Twitter headlines work on the same laws of appeal as any other headline. Keywords are not a big player in twitter as the chance of someone stumbling across your page in twitter search is VERY slim! So forget the keywords for now and just focus on what will get peoples atttention. If you are stuggling at finding inspiration for great headlines check out How To Write Article Titles For Traffic or google it, there is tons of great advice and examples to help you.

Remember when you are writing for twitter that there is no supporting description text so the headline should give a good indication of what the page is about.

Another thing to remember when writing titles for twitter is the 140 Character Limit. You need to work out how long your titles can be. I do it like this, I know the longest URL will be 30 charaters, and my tweet title looke like post-nam | Blog-title. So I add | Timscullin.com 17 characters. 140-17-30 = 93 characters max title length. If I go over this I run the chance of retweeters accidently cutting the link URL short.

Combine All Three

First try and come up with a catchy headline that ties in the keywords. Often this gets really tricky, so if yor stuck try this. Add your keywords followed by a dash then the headline. For example “Writing Post Headlines – 20 Tips For Killer Titles” or “Training German Shepherds – 5 Essential Training Tools”.

Remember to have enough information for it to work without a desciption, tie in the keywords and keep it under your twitter character limit.

I have also seen another post where they suggest you target the social media channels first, then once the traffic drops off after a few weeks change your titles to more google friendly ones. I think this is a good option if you have the time. Check out Winning The Web for more on what they call the “One Two Punch”.

What are your thoughts?