A blog's name is one of the strategic early decisions you will have to make as a blogger. When I started in December 2006, I didn't think of it that way. There was no blogger in my family and inner circle of friends who could tip me off that "search engine optimization" (SEO)--practices whose end goal is to improve a blog's or website's ranking in search engines like Google and Yahoo--revolved around content, and that great content flowed from, or is inspired by, a carefully considered blog name.
As a beginner, my paradigm was simple. My blog has to be either of two things: about something I'm familiar with, or about something I'm interested in. I decided it should be both--a topic of interest as seen from a perspective I'm familiar with. This is why my first blog has a very long title.
What I didn't know then was that there was this thing called SEO that could have provided me with a better framework in naming my blog. When you get down to it, SEO is an embodiment of one of Dr. Stephen R. Covey's famous "Seven Habits," more specifically Habit Two: Beginning with the End in Mind. If a blogger's objective is, say, to rank well in search engine results so that visitor traffic could be directed towards his blog, this line if thinking will naturally lead to the importance of content which, as I said earlier, flows from the blog's name or title.
If you're still unclear as to why, even with that statement, it's because there's yet one missing piece in the SEO puzzle--how search engines work. To be simplistic about it, search engines like Google and Yahoo prowl blogs and websites looking out for specific keywords which they use as "anchors" to hook onto whenever somebody does a search using certain search terms. As a blogger, you would like that your content contains as many of the keywords or search terms that a typical Web user would input in the Google or Yahoo search box. Now, "content" may vary from what a blogger posts or publishes today to the one that he posts tomorrow, but it always includes (as far as the search engines are concerned) the blog's name or title and its brief desciption or subtitle which you see in a blog's so-called header (that strip or banner above the blog where you find the title and subtitle).
In the coding or creation of blogs and websites, the title or name belongs to what are called Meta tags. As explained here: "The word meta means information about. Meta Tags were created early on to provide concise information about a website. Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information." What this means, therefore, is that if your blog title or name belongs to the most often searched terms or keywords, you have a decided advantage over other competitor blogs in your same blogging niche or genre with weaker keywords as part of their title.
Remember, since a blog name or title is a Meta tag, it is one of the bigger spots for a search engine to catch. And once the search results are displayed in Google or Yahoo, it is sometimes the catchier blog title that makes a surfer decide in favor of a lower ranked search result. That's how important a title is in blogging. The recommended length of a title is 50-80 characters including spaces. As a practical advice, put your keywords near the beginning, in case the window is resized on your visitor's computer screen.
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