Do you think a good title makes any difference in traffic?

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Title is not important, but its crucial.

When you finish writing an article, its better to check whether the title of the post is actually what you have talked about in the post. And make sure that the Title is eye catching.

I would recommend spending more time in crafting the Title of the article. Once you finish writing the article, read the article completely and then again read the title of the article. Make sure that the title says whats in the article. If you just write the Title, to make it look interesting to your audience and forget to include proper keywords in it( or if you use the wrong keywords in it) then your article will not be shown in starting pages of search results of search engines, so again that article won’t receive traffic. So take care that, you make the title interesting as well as (relevant)keyword rich, so that you get long term benefits from search engines as well as from Social media, Social networking and Social bookmarking sites.

You can develop writing good Title skills by constantly practicing it on every blog post that you do.

Think of the benefits that you are going to get, from all around:-

1. Search engines will display your title in the search results, if its interesting then there will be more people visiting it.

2. If you promote your article in Social Media, Social Bookmarking and Social Networking sites, then title is almost the deciding factor, to get high traffic or to get almost negligible traffic.

3. Title makes your RSS/email subscribers to visit your blog and to involve/participate in the discussion going on in the comment section.

4. Attracts other bloggers to link to your article. And whenever people link to your article, they use your title as the anchor text and will usually use your title to point their readers to you.

5. Some people will tweet about the article and will share it with their friends and their friends will share it with their friends, if the article headline is really interesting. But I am sure that only 2 or 3 among 10 to 15 will really read the article!

So I could have used  killer blog post titles or The secret to get heavy traffic for this article — But it isn’t a secret anymore. We all know it, but we are just a little bit lazy and/or forget to invest time to craft a better Title. And in some cases you might have tired by writing a long post and you are in a hurry to hit the publish button, to see the reaction of your readers. But remember, invest more time in crafting the Titles also, its worthwhile thing to do. You will have almost 4 times more success with that post, if you write compelling Title.

While we are clearing our emails, sometimes we don’t follow the order in which they have been received. We will sometimes pickup the interesting one, based upon its title. This fact was discovered by Spammers long back, so they started using titles like “You Won $100000 in lotto” etc. But in this case, the content of the email is not true, so people started not reading emails with such titles. Similarly, if you write an interesting Title and if the article doesn’t actually deliver the requirement then such (nice) titles will do much harm then any favor.

An offline, life example:
Here is a story of a blind Boy, who started getting good donation, after changing the sign board statement:
A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet.
He held up a sign board which said: ‘I am blind, please help.’
There were only a few coins in the hat.

A man was walking by.
He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat.
He then took the sign board, turned it around, and wrote some words.
He put the sign board back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up.
A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy.
That afternoon the man who had changed the sign board came to see how things were.
The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, ‘Were you the one who changed my sign board this morning? What did you write?’

The man said, ‘I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.’
What he had written was: ‘Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it.‘

Do you think the first sign and the second sign were saying the same thing?

Of course both signs told people that the boy was blind.
But the first sign simply said the boy was blind.
The second sign told people they were so lucky that they were not blind.
Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?
This is an effective real world example of how the human brain works in its conscious or sub-conscious state.

Some times ago I wrote an article(it was a kind of breaking news, which was already broke by some bloggers!) i.e., I saw that Google Analytics and Adsense integration was officially announced on Analytics blog. So I hurried and wrote about it on my blog. After writing the post, I just felt that I need to do something extra, so I just invested a minute more and wrote an interesting Title, which had all the keywords(to rank in Search Engine) and to attract the people to click on the Title and read the post. The Title was, “Feature Rich Google Analytics Gets Richer By Integrating Adsense ($)”. It received a lot of traffic from social Media sites at that time, and it still receives some traffic from search engines. (It didn’t hit the front page, because the news was not totally unexpected).

And as a counter proof, most of us read news papers every morning. And almost 99.9% of people won’t read the news paper entirely without leaving any words! Most of us read the titles and read most interesting things completely. And read some part of the news which are less interesting. And some times, heading itself is enough to read, no need to read the entire story.

This ensures that Title of an article is not only important, but also crucial.

So lets concentrate more on writing compelling titles on our blog. I will first practice this on my blog and let me write an article about how to write a compelling title, in the future.

Over to readers, please share your thoughts about the importance of the Title of an article.