Title affects blog traffic and Internet visibility through the following ways:

1. Posts stand out from search engine results

Results of search engine queries can be as many as millions. Readers decide which link to click mainly by looking at short excerpts that accompany the search engine results and the title of sites and web pages. Thus, having a web page title that describes the topic or theme of a blog will increase the chance of your post to get visitors from SE.

2. Grabbing the attention of RSS readers

Title has the same attention-grabbing effect in RSS feeds as it has in SE. Even though feeds contain the full posts rather than excerpts, readers are still likely to get overwhelmed by hundreds of feeds to the point that they merely rely on titles to sort which blog is relevant to their interests. This behavior is also seen in the readership of other indexes and directories like Technorati, del.icio.us and digg.

3. Building loyal readership

By using creative titles, you are increasing the chance of your posts to get noticed by web-surfers. Remember that web-surfers often just scan a web page, often bypassing even the contents that they would read otherwise. Using attention-grabbing titles will make it easy for readers to sort out posts that interest them.

4. Search engine optimization

One of the factors used by search engines in indexing web pages is the keyword density in the page title. If the keywords sought by readers are encoded within the HTML title tags of a web page, that page will have SE ranking higher than those with the same keyword density but no such keyword-title combination.

Tips for Choosing Smart Titles

Keep it short and simple

There are many studies that confirmed the effectiveness of short, simple and easy-to-understand titles. If you go for lengthy and verbose titles to grab attention, you may frustrate readers by making it difficult for them to guess whether the content is what they are looking for.  Limit the length of your title to 40 characters to ensure that it will appear in search engine results.

Grab attention

Though titles that shock, make big claims and draw from controversy may get your blog atop the cluttered world of blogsphere, doing so may cause more damage than good to your site if you fail to fulfill the claims made by the titles.

Describe the needs addressed by the content

People looking for specific information are ready to click any titles that they think will satisfy their needs.  Make it easy for prospective readers to figure out what your post is all about by using a title that hints about its purpose.

Use key words

As discussed previously, web pages with titles containing the keywords sent to search engines are ranked higher than it would otherwise without the keywords. Working on keyword-title combination can be challenging as it clashes with the above principle on simplicity, though combining these two guidelines can be done. For SEO purposes, pay attention to the words at the start of titles rather than words at the end.

Don’t use old titles for new posts

This is one of the common mistakes of many bloggers. More often than not, new posts that use the titles of old blogs would never be read.

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