We often hear of great reasons to have catchy and dramatic titles, but I would like to explore the very real advantages of boring and descriptive titles.

This post will tell you how to significantly increase the amount of traffic your blog receives by following a few small steps that will likely take less than a couple of hours.

The internet is used by millions and millions of people everyday who are just looking for an answer to a question or to learn about a specific subject. People on the internet search Google for things like “how to change a diaper”.

The people searching for “how to” do something often are not seeking to be entertained, they are seeking an answer. Search for a “how to” type question on Google and you will find many similar titles. Descriptive ones.

The main benefit of descriptive titles is long term, constant traffic.

If you are a blogger and you want to increase traffic to your blog you can do so today within a few hours by simply reviewing your titles and changing them to more descriptive ones.

Most bloggers measure success by how well their posts were read in the first day or two they were up.

If you are measuring your success by that standard, consider judging your success by how many times your posts are read a week after they were written, or a month, or a year.

Creating blog posts need not be solely for temporary traffic. If you want to increase the sustainable amount of traffic that your blog receives, you can do so by reviewing your titles.

As bloggers, we tend to write things to be fresh, including titles. If you have written a post about how to use wikis for creating traffic, but you called it “You Rock My Wiki” as a fun title then you have missed out on any real chance for receiving long term traffic from search engines for the very subject your article was about.

No one who is seeking to learn about how to use wikis for traffic are going to search for “rock my wiki”. They will search for “how do I use wikis for traffic” or some combination similar to that.

We are SEOs right? We wouldn’t make such a silly mistake as not considering such things would we?

I can tell you I was amazed when I went through my titles and saw what blatant mistakes I was making with them, you may too. I went through my titles several months ago and changed many and I receive tens of thousands of visitors per month to my old posts because of it.

There are two different sets of rules of how to receive traffic to your blog.

1) Blogosphere rules

2) Traditional SEO rules

To have a successful post about a timely subject and to spread it around the blogosphere, you might give it a funky, timely, or funny title and then twitter it creatively. You might use words or phrases in your title that make some timely sense because of a news event or a celebrity oops or something that happened that day.

An example would be Oprah using twitter. Someone probably wrote a useful article about how to create a new twitter account but then gave it a title like “3 Mistakes Oprah Made on Twitter”.

Because of that title it may have gotten alot of views and interaction. That was a blogosphere move, it got traffic! Yum!

Now let’s look at it from a search engine view (long term). Remember how the post was a useful resource about how to create a new Twitter account? Well with that title, it will never actually reach an audience of people searching for “how to create a new twitter account”.

This is a shame, particularly if it was a well written and useful resource. If they changed the title to “How to Create a New Twitter Account in Five Minutes” they would actually have a chance at long term traffic for those seeking to learn the very thing the author is trying to teach, especially armed with those links they got from the blogosphere.

The good news is you can work your titles for both the blogosphere world and the search engine ranking world by simply reviewing your titles every couple of months and changing the bloggy titles to more descriptive ones. Keeping a bit of an eye on the future when writing your posts doesn’t hurt either.

For the blogosphere, go crazy on those titles, but later you may want to remember the Google guidelines which state

“Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.“

A great tool to review and change your blog post titles is Stephan Spencers Title Tag Word Press Plugin.

Related posts:
Why you should be careful with titles
Twitter Spam from NBC?
Ask Google – Adjusting a Webpage for Profit