The importance of good post titles to your overall traffic
If you’ve been reading about writing content for the web for any length of time you have probably seen more than one A-List blogger expound on the value of a good post title. Blogs both big and small, from doshdosh and Andy Beard to blogs you may not have heard of, like Flooded Lizard Kingdom are all talking about the importance of post titles, and with good reason; having a great title on your post is far more likely to get that post read than having a mediocre one.
I’m not just saying this because the big boys have mentioned it, or because it’s a simple way to get your posts read more often. I’ve decided to cover the topic because I just ran a study on it and have proven (to myself at least) that it works beyond the shadow of a doubt. A simple change in tile tags has increased traffic to my food and cooking blog over the past two weeks. The numbers prove it, but they would be meaningless without some background, so let me run through the changes that I made to the blog, then detail the results.
Making some changes:
Like any case study, this one began with a set of base numbers and the realization that there was room for improvement. In looking over my visitor stats for Cooking, by the seat of my Pants!, I noticed a trend in which posts were visited most often. With only a few specific exceptions, posts in the “recipes” category that had the word “recipe” in the title got the most overall traffic. Other posts received far fewer visits in general.
The exceptions to the rule were for posts that I targeted specifically to people that would be looking for the keywords in the title and were quite specific. They can be easily negated from overall site traffic, but have proven over time to bring in a steady stream of visitors. Those post titles were left unchanged and are considered a baseline measure of success in good post titles.
For the rest of the recipes on the site, I went through and added the word “recipe” to the title in a manner that made sense in the context of the existing title. The post slugs were left exactly as they were, no permalinks were modified and the posts themselves were left exactly as they were originally written. No other settings were changed. Then I did something that would make most bloggers shudder or recoil in horror…
I stopped posting on my most read blog without notice.
Doing the unthinkable:
Yes, you read the above statement correctly. I stopped posting. I walked off to handle other projects and no matter how badly I wanted to add something, I wouldn’t let myself do it. For this to be a true test of the effectiveness of title tags, I needed to give it a bit of time without influencing the numbers. I figured two weeks should do it, so that’s how long I left it alone.
I’m not saying that I didn’t lose traffic. I did. According to Google Analytics, my overall traffic was down by 9.46% overall. Not having any new posts meant that readers that normally visit my site via RSS readers, twitter announcements and StumbleUpon simply weren’t visiting, as there was nothing new for them to see. This was an expected side effect of the study. It’s painful, but not something that can’t be recovered from.
The exciting part of the experiment is in daily visitor totals.
Change the titles, watch the visitors come in!
While the difference in visitors wasn’t earth shattering, it was more than noticeable. Over the course of two weeks with no effort on my part, I not only maintained constant numbers, but also managed to increase my baseline traffic. (Traffic generated organically through search engines.) The following snapshot of my Google Analytics dashboard illustrates this increase:

If you look at the beginning of the graph, traffic consistently dips below the 450 unique visitors per-day mark on those days when no post was added to the blog. This level of traffic was consistent from the end of the Holiday season until I modified my title tags. Those modifications were made on march 4th, and as is demonstrated in the graph above, the number of visitors to the site increased almost immediately and steadily held above the 450 visitor mark for all but one day in March. (The rise in visits in the middle of March was due to an increased interest in Irish recipes, also an organic response, but since I wasn’t adding new recipes, it caused only a light increase in visits.)
In the end, the data speaks for itself. With the investment of just a little time and effort in changing title tags, I managed an overall increase in organic traffic. While this increase was not enough to raise my overall visits above what I would have gotten if I had posted every day, it was enough to keep my numbers from faltering significantly over a two week period; something that definitely would have happened had I simply stopped posting without modifying the tags.
It must also be taken into consideration that in the world of food blogs, cooking, by the seat of my Pants! is a relatively new blog, with only two years worth of posts and only a bit over 240 recipes. On a site with more titles to gain results, the numbers would have been far more significant.
Wrapping it up:
I hope this article will inspire you to take another look at your post titles. Take the time to make sure that the title of the post is relevant to what your visitors are searching for. Check your analytics for specific posts and see if the search terms that got people to your post are actually relevant to the post itself. If you haven’t been thinking about the importance of your titles, you may be surprised what got people to your site in the first place.
Getting comments on your blog is usually something that bloggers look forward to. For the most part, people comment when they like what you’ve written or agree with what you’ve had to say.
The last time you heard something similar to the title of this article may have been in high school, but if you think for a moment that it doesn’t apply to your blog as well, you had better think again. The language you use when publishing blog posts may very well be a factor in readers deciding to add your blog to their feed reader, or just moving on to another blog and leaving yours in the dust for good.