The humble blog post title is important because it has to grab the readers’ attention. It has to draw people in; get them interested, but it also has to perform other tasks.
But what should the humble blog post title actually look like?
Take the title for this post as an example – “Is there a correct format for a blog post title?” The title is a question and there are no proper names, so I have written it as such; a capital letter at the start of the sentence and the rest of the words in the title lower case.
In blogging cirlces it is very common to see the first letter of each word in a blog title using uppercase characters; which would have made the title look like this “Is There A Correct Format For A Blog Title?”.
A slight variation on this format and one which I used to favour, is to use capital letters for the first letter of major words and lower case letters for the first letter of “connecting words” such as “is”, “the”, “this”, “and”, “for”, “them” and “us” etc. In this case, the title would have looked like this: “Is there a Correct Format for a Blog Title?”.
This doesn’t look particularly pretty and I may even have been tempted to capitalise the word “there” for the soul reason that it looks better – “Is There a Correct Format for a Blog Title?”.
The answer is NO
There is no set format for a blog post (or article) title. Most people will choose a format which looks the way they want it to, rather than follow any grammatical rules.
I have looked at a few popular blogs and news sites to see which formats they favour. The research was by no means exhaustive, but it gives an interesting insight into how headlines and post titles are formatted.
Sites which use all lower case titles except for Proper Names
Sites Which Capitalise Major Words but not “Connecting Words”
Sites Which Capitalise Every Word
Site which don’t Give a Fig and Use a Mixture
I dare say that every single article or post on each of these sites will not have the same format, this is just a quick indicator of how grammar doesn’t really come into how a headline looks, it is all about aesthetics.
Related posts:
- Finally, confirmation from Google that the meta keywords tag is mickey mouse
- What is the best thing about running a blog with little traffic?
- Google Labs releases browser Title Tweaks to monitor Gmail inbox
- 5 SitePoint books (in PDF format) for the price of 1
- Blog Comment Demon software review – first thoughts
- Blog Comments Equals More Traffic, More Friends and a Happy Blogger
- Google Launches New Blog Search Website
- Sell advertising space on your website or blog
- Who is trying to hack my blog today?
- ProBlogger Challenge – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
