If you want people to read your articles online, most of your visitors are going to find you through search, so you need to use words people are going to be searching on. Especially in the headline.

For example, I was writing a post on my home brewing blog and my marketing hat suddenly slipped onto my head. I thought, “Hey, optimization boy, take some of your own medicine.”

So I started to use various online tools to make sure I was picking the right words for the title of my homebrewing blog post. Then I realized I should blog about that process over here.

I was writing two posts at the same time. One on homebrewing and one (for this blog) on how I picked the right words for my homebrewing blog. I was going to title this post “Before you write that blog post,” and then — again — I realized I wasn’t following the right seo principles.

“Before you write that blog post” would sound good enough for a pre-qualified audience — i.e., people who are already interested in how to write a blog post to get maximum traffic. So if you’re writing a newsletter to people who want to know about that, fine.

That’s not the way blogs work. (Who searches on “before you write”?)

So off I went to google again to see which words to use for this post (on how to pick words for blog posts).

The first thing to do is dream up a couple options. I wondered if “article” or “headline” got more traffic, so I typed them into Google trends and found that “article” gets a lot more search.

But … what about “blog”? I tried that, and it’s no contest. “Blog” gets way more search than “article” or “headline.”

What other words should I use? Should my title be “blog headline” or “optimize blog” or … hey, what about “blog seo”?

That was killer. “Blog seo” creams “blog headline” and “optimize blog.”

I would like to be able to test “blog seo tricks, blog seo ideas, blog seo how to,” but google trends doesn’t show any results for those phrases, so I just did “tricks, ideas, how to” — and “how to” takes the field.

Now there’s no guarantee that “blog seo how to” is the best phrase, but it’s sure likely to be better than “Before you write that blog post,” and it only took me about a minute to figure that out.

The lesson is — before you write an article for the web, do some research to see what words and phrases work best!

Now then, back to homebrewing, which is what got me over here in the first place.

I was about to blog about my son’s new porter recipe, which I am enjoying as I type.

I write a weekly post on homebrewbeer.biz about home brewing.

So then. What words work best for an article about a porter recipe?

There isn’t a synonym for “porter,” so I’m kinda stuck with that word.

I do have to decide between “home brew” and “homebrew.” Consulting google trends, “homebrew” wins.

Now this is where the editor and the marketer have to come to terms, because from time to time the editor will say that X is better, and the marketer will say that Y gets more search.

You’re going to have to make up your mind. Do you want to be the lonely little correct guy in the corner who’s ever-so proud of his grammar, or do you want people to find and read what you’ve written?

I thought so.

Now — as you experiment on google trends you come up with some odd ideas. For example, my first thought for a headline was something like “Ben’s Home Brew Porter — an intermediate homebrew recipe.”

(Note that I slipped “home brew” and “homebrew” into the same title to cover my bases.)

But what about “how to”? It killed on blog optimization. So I tested “homebrew recipe” against “homebrew how to,” and … “how to” killed again.

People seem to search on “how to” quite a lot. There might be a lesson in that.

Anyway, are the people who search on that phrase the right people for my article? Are people who are searching on stuff like “homebrew how to” looking for beer recipes?

(It turns out there’s this Nintendo “homebrew” thing that has absolutely nothing to do with making beer at home.)

But the good old wonder wheel guided me on this one. When I typed in “homebrew how to” it was clear that most of the sub-topics are related to making beer at home. That’s all good.

So I settled on Homebrew how to — Ben’s Mild Porter Recipe.

I could have spent some more time on this and tweaked it a bit more, but … hey, home brewing is just a hobby of mine.

Nevertheless, it’s always worth five minutes of your time in the google tools to pick the right words. And “right” (in this context) means words people actually care about and search on.