Some time ago Nick Bradbury (author of the marvelous FeedDemon which is now free!) said that the best way to increase feed readership is to use great titles. Whilst this is undoubtedly true if your blog has a lot of subscribers, the fact is most of us Z-list bloggers don't actually have many people who subscribe to our blogs. According to Google Sitemaps I currently have two people signed up via Google Reader, which I'm pretty astounded by given my tendency to ramble on incoherently about random subjects.
The fact is 90% of my hits come from Google and Google doesn't care about great titles, it cares about matching up search terms to relevant content. One good way to drive traffic to your site is to write about things that interests searchers and that other people aren't writing about, given that if some A-list blogger does write about it you'll get shoved down the search result list. For me, SonicWall, HTML tick marks and Vista sound problems are the most popular subjects...
Anyway, the things to have in your titles are the words people are likely to use when they are searching for something related to your post. If it's in the title, Google will consider the text more important than if it's just in the body of the post somewhere. So forget great titles, have relevant titles.
1 comment:
Well, the title got my attention :)
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