Title of any blog post speaks on behalf of rest of the post

But, whenever we write title of any post we usually use characters like,

• Double Quote ( ” ” )
• Single Quote ( ‘ ‘ )
• Comma ( , )
• Question Mark ( ? )
• Hyphen ( – )
• Dash ( En Dash ” – “  or Em Dash ” — “)
• Apostrophes ( ‘ )
• Exclamation Points ( ! )
• Colons ( : )
• Ampersand ( & )

etc. and we need to take some care choosing these characters, why? because It has been found that whenever your post title is syndicated in RSS feed some of those above mentioned characters gets distorted and replaced by ” ? “. Specially this happens for the characters like, Double Quote ( ” ” ), Em Dash (” — “), Apostrophes ( ‘ ), etc.

Recently I have found it in RssHugger (rssHugger fetches blog title from RSS feed). Check out this examples,

Did you noticed something? On the above mentioned title, originals are Brijit – “Smart, Sexy, Fun, Helpful, and Well-Read” & Otterbox iPhone cases – they’re not waterproof. So, the problem caused here by Double Quote ( ” ” ), Em Dash ( ” — “) and Apostrophes ( ‘ ) and these characters are replaced by Question Mark ( ” ? ” ). But, if you look closely En Dash ( ” – ” ) is used in one of the above title but it is not distorted.

So, as suggestion try to avoid Double Quote ( ” ” ), Em Dash ( ” — “) and Apostrophes ( ‘ ) when writing title of blog post. Here the problems of not well formatted title are

• It looks odd
• It may distract reader

Then, which characters are safe to use? Characters like, En Dash or Hyphen( ” – ” ), Comma ( , ), Colons ( : ), Question Mark ( ? ), Exclamation Points ( ! ), etc. are safe to use but, Ampersand ( & ) also creates problem, so instead of Ampersand ( & ) we can write ” and “.

So, when title of any blog post speaks on behalf of rest of the post, then we need to take care of its format also, then only we can consider it as “Good Blogging Practice”, isn’t it?