More than with websites, blog titles tend to be whimsical, abstract, catchy, and provoking. Bloggers love words, and metaphors. They love to pique your interest with a juicy tidbit, to make you wonder what the article is really about.

Search engines don’t understand the abstract too well though. They are bad at indexing metaphors, and parables hold no meaning beyond the literal. The power to people is lost on search engines, and hence lost to people SEARCHING for the very thing you are offering.

Installation of an SEO plugin can help you to separate the article title from the page title tag. The best of both worlds. Well… not exactly. But more balance, to be sure.

Blogging began for people. And it has always been about writing from the heart, and less about optimizing to the teeth. So if you have to make a choice, keep the feeling. In this instance, your target audience is bloggers, not search engines. But be aware that you’ll have to do a little more work elsewhere - more backlinks, more careful consideration of tags in your article, more thought in the anchor text that you use for backlinks, maybe a little more deep linking to specific blog posts - and perhaps a little more work on optimizing other aspects of the site.

If evocative post titles are important to your style, use them. People appeal has far more power in the long term to advance you, than search engine power, and pleased people can GIVE you search engine power.