With only a few words and milliseconds to grab people’s attention these days,

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Titles are crucial to determining how “viral” a blog post may be, and whether or not the casual passer-by will stop and click (and hopefully read). Rob – JIMMY KELLY says Hi Brian, I never gave much credence to headlines in my simplicity as I always felt I my work was descending into tabloid journalism when I did. I learnt the hard way, by little or no traffic to my site. I now actually enjoy comming up with engaging headlines for pedestrian topics, and appreciate that its definitely and art in itself. So much to learn. Thanks again for a great article. I'm glad my response was meaningful to you. I've noticed a lot of blog tips are directed to blogs that already have “decent traffic” ( I consider that to be 100-500 unique

Visitors per day and 10+ retweets which should put you Fax Lists roughly between 100,000 and 40,000 on Alexa ). It is much easier to tweak your page when you have a larger sample to take from. I'm no expert, but I've read time and time again, write for your readers first, SEO second. In my limited experience, I get more traffic from well written titles than keyword heavy titles. The more I read, it seems like inbound “dofollow” links and actual traffic help your SERP more than your headlines. I liked the video aspect of your blog. I'll be coming back. BRIAN CLARK says Blake, that's a good point about Twitter (and a good reason to concentrate on building a following there). I mainly included that so people would understand how I knew the post was performing below average.


And you nailed it with your answer to Aaron. Always write for readers first, since that's what prompts social media sharing and links. In turn, your site's general domain authority and the authority of linked posts gives you a lot of the SEO equation. You can always “optimize” your title for keywords after you get links and traffic, but it's a bad idea to do it first. JOHN POHL says To your point, I didn't read Sherice's post because the headline told me that it wasn't relevant to me. While your revised headline is much better, I think I'd be even more likely to respond to a more positive slant, such as “How to make sure your readers believe you.” Or, if you prefer the question approach , “Are you maximizing your credibility?” MICHAEL says Good article, but I can't help thinking there's one more way to avoid a “headline fail”:don't use über – trendy stuff like “fail” as a noun. Every time I see that,