Heather’s SEO Copywriting Certification course does address this, as distilled in this post from the previous year: http://www.seocopywriting.com/content-marketing/leverage-your-online-writing-for-optimization-and-conversions/

Thank you Derek, for sharing your insight! :)

Did anyone else notice the complete lack of an optimized title for the purposes of SEO? The subject of the piece – J.C. Penney – was in no way mentioned with other extremely common things we’d use to find the article. like “SEO”. Instead they opted for “search optimization and its dirty little secrets”.

Granted, the Times is a major publication so they’ve got global reach and plenty of people to carry the story but if you did the quick search (that many people were likely doing) of “nytime seo jc penney” or something similar you couldn’t find this article.

You were turning up other blog posts. The Times could have better positioned themselves with a much stronger title from an SEO standpoint to ensure that the traffic came to them first.

This is one of those times where a properly optimized title would have likely provided more benefit than the marketing hook they used in the current title. Too many businesses make this mistake and unfortunately the smaller businesses that don’t have a network of followers like the Times wind up with their content getting lost – never to be discovered – all because of a title derp.

Hi Shelly! Great to know you found it a useful resource, and so glad to include your piece! Thank you:-)

~Shelly