By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

How many times have you read a title to a blog post from an RSS feed, tweet or widget and thought, “OMG, I have to read that”, only to find out that when you read the post that the content doesn’t really have anything to do with the title?

I’m guessing that it happens once or twice a day to everyone using the internet. And once it does you feel that you’ve been duped. Even if the title is a unfortunate error, the mistake devalues the experience, content and the blog’s brand.

I’ve been guilty of it myself in my personal blogging and I am sure that I have probably done it here on Tech Startups as well.

Below is a list of 5 tips for blog post titles that I wrote up for myself this morning after I followed a sensational post title, Death to Flash: 3 Great HTML 5 Demos, to only find out the post was about technology that is years away from mass acceptance and doesn’t ever address the death of Flash. Duped.

1. Accurate
   • Make sure that if you have titled a post before writing it that you review it before posting. What you set out to write might not be what you actually wrote. Accuracy is the hook for readers if you’ve written a good title that shuns sensationalism. Your readers will thank you by coming back.
2. Contextually Relevant
   • The same way that you would choose an image to accompany a post or hope that Google puts the right adsense ads by a post, you should focus on matching a title that is relevant to the posts topic. This means ancillary language to support accuracy.
3. To the Point
   • Short, curt, to the point. Hit the high notes in as few words as possible.
4. Natural Speech
   • Ensure that the title isn’t gibberish that will confound readers. It must make sense. A good trick for testing out a title is to read it aloud.
5. Search Friendly
   • My favorite of the blogging 101 tips. Writing with the other 4 tips in mind will allow you to distill down the topic into search engine magic. Use keywords and other current pop culture language.

Good titles should be life preservers that keep posts afloat. The wrong title for a post or one that doesn’t follow some sort of structure will sink the content.

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