No, no. I told you to skip this and obviously the rule is broken.

Either that or you are just curious about the worst blog tip ever — which I promised in the title.

Well, as I always deliver my promise, I will reveal it later. But first, stick with me for the moment. Deal?

The primary purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate the importance of writing a great blog title or headline — whatever you like to call it — up front.

Regardless of the quality of your content, what makes you read this in the first place is good title. You may call it raising curiosity, “cheating”, or whatever. It works. You read.

So, to repeat, the headline or title stops the readers right in their tracks to read more.

If the title is so critical, it is worth spending more time on it, at least more than the amount most of us are willing to spend on.

A note about using a trick to draw reader’s attention:

I don’t recommend you to cheat people into reading your content. In fact, keeping your promise is entirely critical for your credibility.

While the “Please Skip This” title works for some of us, it won’t bring you any good in the long run — if you keep doing it without keeping your promise. People will learn they can’t trust you and skip your content regardless of the title.

Contrarily, the second piece of title obviously should be of some interests to those who are into business blogging. Who doesn’t want to know the worst blog tip — so they could avoid it — and prevent having to risk their effort?

Finally, again as promised, the worst blog tip is to start a blog because it can give you fast result or just for the sake of having one. If you have a blog but not yet any valuable content, and decide blogging is not for you, please consider to take it down.

Blogging takes time. If you decide you can’t post every so often, but have no valuable things yet to offer to your readers, the blog will just put your credibility at stake.

Content is important. Unmaintained blog with some valuable content is okay as they may become a good archive for your content.

People don’t like to waste time.

Sometimes, having no blog is better than having a bad one.

What do great blog posts should have in common?

Before we try to answer this question, I hope we agree on a few things here. A great blog post — one that is not only great to read but also does the marketing and selling well — is the result of doing many small things right. Writing great content is just the start. You have to let people read it, submit feedback or for business blogging, at least the readers know more about you.

Knowing more about you or your business could mean they understand their problem clearer or realize what you could offer to help them.

Now, that is a topic for another blog post…

The question is, all things being equal, what is the single most important factor that a great blog post should have?

If your answer is great content, you are wrong. Unfortunately.

In my opinion, the answer is “great blog title.”

Why? I hear you ask. Good question.

Great content may increase the chance of people finding your writing in the blog search engines but still without great blog title only a few of the searchers would actually click on the results. Won’t you agree?

A great post is worth reading, so it depends on a great blog title to have people actually read it.

I hope it makes sense for you now.

The job of the blog title is to get the first line of the blog post read. It is just as simple as that. But, on the Internet, it also encourages people to click the search results when it appears, choose it among the syndicated headlines, etc.

It is true, there are times you are interested to read more about content while skimming through the content and notice an eye-catching graphic. But, most of us still scan the titles to determine which blog entries are worth reading. This is especially the case when you use a specialized RSS reader to read blogs.

My quick tip is this. Too often, we just overlook on this one. Spend more time crafting your blog title. The fact that more people read your blogs and click the headlines as the result of better headlines are well worth it, I believe. It could mean more business and increase in bottom line.

I am so excited Robyn Tippins, a successful professional blogger, responded to my email requesting an interview with her the other day about professional blogging.

What’s more exciting is the fact that not only she shared the tools and tips she uses daily to write her blogs and drive traffic to them, she also generously provided hard numbers and the exact revenue sources that earn her full time income every month.

Without further ado, let me introduce her to you, if you haven’t already known her.

Robyn Tippins have been online since 1996. She started to get involve with online communities as a chat moderator and board monitor for AOL in 1997. The next year (1998), she started business manufacturing cloth diapers and sold them online.

Now, she is a full time blogger at SleepyBlogger.com, GamesIndustryWire.com (b5), Innovative Advertising (Allbusiness.com), SocialRiots.com (KMM), InsideMotherhood.com (b5), Pittwatch.com (b5) and Gamingandtech.com. The last one is her video blog.

She also runs a blogger forum that focuses on networking. This forum will be a place where users could find blogger profiles and post blogging jobs.

Her success in professional blogging comes from the fact that she loves blogging. She insisted on doing it to replace her full time income. But, when she reached the goal last fall, she switches her goal accordingly to increase revenue while at the same time still enjoy blogging.

Her first blogging job was writing for $3 per post. Not a number that we would write home about, but in my opinion it contributed to her success that she achieved later. Being able to sacrifice her ego and passionate about blogging earn her growths in knowledge, experiences and revenue. If you are willing to do this almost for nothing at the beginning and being persistent, you are going to see results.

When it comes to the tools she uses for blogging, Tippins lists some of these software (mostly online):

• Flickr - She upgraded to the pro version of the online photo sharing tool to take advantage of more spaces and bandwidth.
• del.icio.us - Online bookmarking site. She also install delicious extension for Firefox.
• FeedDigest - An online tool that mash together some of her favorite RSS feeds.
• FeedBurner - Deliver RSS feeds with a lot of features.
• Blip.tv - Using the autopost feature for video blogging.
• ClearContext - An Outlook utility that allows her to prioritize her emails.
• Gmail - She also backs up her email by forwarding a copy to Gmail.

Tippins allocates between 9am to noon everyday for blogging. As with most bloggers, she takes advantage of feeds to syndicate content to her desktop.

Being resourceful is important. She regularly delivers content that her readers could not live without. Not only she writes great posts, but also content that other bloggers would be hesitant to write about. What can you do other than subscribe to such content?

In driving traffic, she taps into social bookmarking sites, subscription, external links (toptensites, gather, squidoo), search engines, commenting on other blogs and linking A LOT to other blogs. She also tries collaborative projects (carnivals) recently with success.

By doing exactly these, she grew one of her blogs, SleepyBlogger to 125K pageviews and 12k unique visits per month.

To encourage participation and have the readers comments on the blogs, she offers something of value. You might be surprised that another simple tip is just ask for it.

Blogging fits perfectly into online marketing because marketing is about knowing who you want to reach and deliver exactly what they want to them. She thinks bloggers are naturally good at this because they have to do it to keep their readership.

Tippins didn’t accept advertising on her blogs until recently. She has a bold opinion about ads. She thinks without credibility and traffic, ads could only add a level of smarminess.

One of the most challenging things in blogging, for Tippins, is still getting things in writing. If you think you have everything perfect before you get started blogging, think again. Every blogger I know started somewhere. They learn and grow with their blogs and become successful.

Although she likes the idea about user generated content, she can see that the blogosphere would become busier and tighter in the future. Splogs (spam blogs) will continue to be a problem, the Internet is also going to be flooded with ads. But still, blogging is going to stay because, she added, “when the user is in charge of what they view and where they go online, it just feels right, you know.”

Note: This interview is part of a series of interviews I am going to conduct with small business owners and service professionals who have practically use a blog and blogging to improve their business and marketing in many ways.

Hope we all could learn something from those who have been there and done it. If you want to be part of the interview series, you are more than welcome to contact me using the contact form here.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog feed to get updated for future interviews.

SEO copywriting does not only help search spiders to determine about the kind of information available on your site, but also make it easier for your readers to find the right piece of information by using site search. Additionally, readers could relate better to the text that contains the keyword(s) they are searching for.

In previous blog post, I have quite gone through the reasons why I think SEO copywriting is still required to certain extent for bloggers. Especially in a niche where there are lot of competitions, you want every advantage you can get.

Much of your efforts should be spent on writing great content regularly. But knowing a few SEO tactics could really help you when designing your blog template, compose the blog title and write copy that relate to your readers.

The beauty of having a blog is that once you know what piece of data you want to put on each part of the page, you can now design a search engine friendly template and use it throughout your blog consistently. Some of the pieces are one time design work, while others may require you to research on which specific terms exactly are your readers use to locate information from search engines.

So, without further ado, here are a few SEO copywriting tips every blogger must know.

1. Page titles

If you could not include your keyword anywhere else, put it in the page title. It is the most effective and powerful page element in SEO.

The catch is, sometimes for some reasons you just can not include your keyword in the blog title. For this situation, remember that writing for human is more important than search engines.

However, keep in mind that if a user search for “keyword” in a search engine such as Google, the keyword will be highlighted. Having the keyword appears on the title and highlighted attracts eyeballs instantly.

2. Meta keywords and meta description

Meta keywords are dead. It has practically no effect on search engine ranking nowadays.

We could assume almost the same for meta description but in cases where all of the factors are equal, the page with optimized meta description will outrank the page with none of the meta data.

I would recommend that you have the blog software automatically include the meta data entries in your blog pages. Perhaps the first sentence from the first paragraph will be appropriate, but not always. Having your keyword in the first sentence of the content is recommended tactic though, especially if you take the excerpt from the content or place Google AdSense ads on your page.

Forget writing meta description separately for each blog entry. It is a huge waste of time, in my humble opinion.

3. Header tags (H1 and H2)

H1 tags are effective page elements for SEO. Use them for the title of your blog posts. Needless to say, H2 tags are less effective than H1, but could be used to highlight the subtitles of your body content.

Subtitles are also the place to put your keywords. They act as stoppers for readers to rest their eyes. If you include keywords, they will get noticed. Search engine crawlers take these into account too.

4. Body copy

If you read some old texts on search engine optimization, you will notice the terms keyword density. After spending a lot of time writing the right copy, stuffing exactly the amount of keywords to achieve the best keyword density, you found out that still you page was not found anywhere on the first 10 pages of the search results.

Perhaps the ideal keyword density had changed since then..

Bad news for you. But also good news at the same time.

Bloggers could just ignore keyword density forever. They do no good for your rankings. They turn off your readers if you blatantly stuff keywords on the blog pages.

Finally, some of the factors you should pay attention to nowadays regarding body copy in blog post:

• Keyword prominence. How close to the start of the content before the keyword appears. The closer the keyword to the start of the content, generally the better it becomes. It is not a rule though. Just do your best with this bit of info.
• Bold and italics. Bold text carries more weight than regular text, and so does italics. Use them sparingly all over your content, particularly to highlight keywords. I often use these features to highlight important copy instead of keywords.
• Anchor texts. The right anchor text helps search crawlers that utilize this information to know what your page is about and the topic of the page you link to.
• Themed words / keyword variations. Place themed words and keyword variations in the body copy to increase relevancy. Google especially takes these keywords into account to determine the theme of your site.

In essence, while bloggers can do very well without knowing a bit about SEO or SEO copywriting, still having just a bit of knowledge about how search engines work could increase the chance of your blog posts to rank on search engines for particular keywords.

The debate about SEO copywriting is alive and well. For years, unscrupulous webmasters to experts have voiced their opinions about search engine optimization (SEO) and how to write well for both human visitors and search engines.

Do blogs need SEO? Do bloggers need to know SEO copywriting to rank well on search engines?

First and foremost, let’s come up with a definition of SEO copywriting. Like I said before, it is a technique of writing viewable text on a web page so that it reads well for both readers and search engine spiders. The technique optimizes the on-page elements for the targeted search keywords.

Blogs Are About Interaction from Humans

If we keep this little fact in mind, we should appreciate that the most precious assets we could build from a blog are readers, which comes from constant quality substance, i.e. content, and traffic.

While getting traffic from search engines are a benefit by itself, human referrals are doubtlessly the highest quality of stranger traffic a blogger could get.

Those who come to your blog because other bloggers refer them to you are more than likely to take the next step to buy or want more information from you. Often, they will end up subscribing to your blog feed.

What if the referred traffic are bloggers? Assuming that the blog post is really of interest to the blogger, they will link to it, driving you even more inbound links — that turn into traffic and stronger link popularity.

Blog traffic are also interactive in a way they will give feedbacks by commenting on the blog post. Those are the reasons why they are so valuable.

About Organic Search Traffic and Blogs

Organic search traffic is useful for blogs only it is targeted. It should drive the right visitors to the right page, as close to what they search as possible. Search engine algorithms play a big role when it comes to relevancy.

In some industries, it is hard, if not impossible to get search engine traffic because of both competition and user characteristics. In these niches, it is necessary to focus on other traffic strategies instead of search.

If advertising is not an option, think blogging. The good news is by blogging, not only you can get a lot of referral traffic, but your search rankings will also follow naturally.

How SEO Copywriting Matters

Those who say that SEO copywriting is dead is trying hard to drive controversy. Believe me.

What they usually say is more or less like this:

“You still need on-page optimization, lots of inbound links, site promotion, etc. But you don’t need keyword stuffing and other cheesy tactics..”

SEO copywriting is more than just stuffing a lot of keywords on the page. While search engines now factor in anchor text to determine the topic of a web page and site, still page content and site theme are important.

They also can somehow modify what people use as the anchor text to link to the page.

While on-page factors are less significant for modern search engines nowadays, at least they could help the search engine crawlers to recognize what the web page is about.

Good SEO copywriting also help readers to quickly find out what a page is about before they decide to read further.

Summary

Although SEO copywriting is still useful, there are other things that every blogger should pay more attention to.

If getting search traffic is one of your goal in blogging, then by all means don’t overlook SEO copywriting. You need to do your best and implement all the advantages you can get, especially if it is a competitive niche.

But still, remember that blogging is about human interaction. Writing a lot of great content and network with other bloggers are far more important to get you more quality traffic and inbound links, which in turn will build your search traffic too.

Finally, the last thing you want to do is turning off your readers with repetitive keywords all over the page. You want your readers to do whatever you wish them to do after reading your blog post — better conversion, not clicking on the close button. The only way to achieve this is by carefully write each paragraph and at the same time remember the keywords most likely will related best to your readers.