Jan 9, 2014 / Traffic & Growth

Attracting Traffic: Tips for Writing Great Blog Post Titles

You’ve been working hard on your blog: you put thought and effort into your About page, your site title and tagline, and you’ve even picked a funky blog name. You sweat your photography. You read and re-read your drafts to make sure they’re just so.

With over 1.4 million posts published on WordPress.com every day, how do you make sure your work stands out in the crowd? Crafting strong post titles is one way to snag reader attention, pique interest, attract followers, and earn repeat visits. Here’s a few ideas to think about as your write titles for your posts.

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There are plenty of posts like What Game of Thrones Taught me About Modern Society or Everything I know about Marriage, I Learned from Homer Simpson in the world today.

How many listicles have you seen recently? You know what I’m talking about: 10 Signs Millennials Will Ruin the World, or 15 Ways to Tell if You Really Are a Hipster. Sure, these types of headlines have become commonplace on the web and we too enjoy a funny listicle now and again. If you want your work to stand out from the crowd, you might want to rethink these types of constructions, unless you feel you’ve got a piece that transcends the genre. And in that case, we can’t wait to read it.

Study the masters

Chances are, there’s title inspiration and guidance in the blogs and magazine articles you’re already reading. Are there a few sites or magazines that you really like? Study their titles. Consider what it is about these titles that draws you in.

What captured your attention? What tickled your curiosity? Try emulating your favorite authors when you write post titles. Me? I admire Maria Popova‘s title writing style over at Brain Pickings. Never trite, always enticing, Maria’s posts always end up in my Instapaper account for later brain feeding. Here’s a few Brain Pickings post titles that caught my attention:

Lead with the end in mind

If you’re writing to educate, be it to share a personal anecdote or offer hard-won advice, it’s good to ask yourself: What’s the most important thing I want my reader to remember from reading this post? Crafting the answer into a post title automatically reinforces your most important point for the reader, making sure your message not only gets heard, but remembered.

Try creating intrigue or using the element of surprise with titles by alluding to something readers can only see or learn by reading the post. Consider Maria Popova’s headline above, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Little-Known, Gorgeous Art. Right away, I’m surprised — One of my favorite authors — Bilbo Baggins‘ daddy no less — was not only a writer, but also an artist? This piece of new information makes me want to follow that link and find out about Tolkien’s works of art.

BONUS: How do Google, Twitter, and Facebook see it?

Your post’s title automatically becomes your post’s slug, which is part of the permanent link or URL to your post.

If your post title is fairly long, (over six or seven words) consider editing your slug to remove words such as “to,” “from,” “our,” “this,” “that,” etc., that don’t specifically relate to the post’s topic, for speedier search engine parsing. For example, this post’s slug would have been:

/attracting-traffic-tips-for-writing-great-blog-post-titles

I shortened the slug to the following to put the emphasis on the main idea: writing great post titles.

/writing-great-post-titles

If you’ve got your blog automatically connected to push and tweet posts to Facebook and Twitter, post titles are what gets sent out as a default via Publicize, so it’s important to consider how your post’s title might be perceived when it appears on your social networks.

As you write your piece, you may also want to think about the words readers will use to search for your post and ensure those words get a place in the title.

And now, over to you

Writing enticing titles is not only an art form, it takes a bit of practice. In your blogging experience, what have you found most effective when it comes to blog post titles? Share your tips with the class in the comments.

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  2. I have always love playing with words when writing that’s why those titles with a little play catches my attention. For a start, those rhyming phrases and antonym/synonym words can be a lot of help.

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  3. My most popular title comes from a reference to an MTR exit in Hong Kong. I think tourists are looking for directions but they find my blog. This always surprises me a bit. Fortunately the post in question offers a bit of background about what is in the neighbourhood of the exit and also the possibility to explore a bit further from the exit. I guess what I am saying is unusual place names also make good titles, but as you say in your advice you need to write something about the place if you do use it in the title.

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  6. So I am new to this. I am very interested and I cannot wait to get going. However I don’t have any friends that I can share this with through Twitter or my email and Facebook will not connect for some reason.. 😦

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  7. “Listicles” (are we seriously calling them that nowadays?) may be old hat, but seriously… they’re still the most read posts I’ve ever written. People just like bulletpoints, I guess.

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  8. I’m bad at naming my blog post. Especially with series post which conform to the same format like “Collage 1- ____!”, “Guess where am I #1 – ___” and “I love ___!”. Any ideas to creatively name series blog post?

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    1. I took a peek at your blog and think your titles are just fine — there’s some variety and you use the subject of the post well in your titles.

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      1. Thanks for checking up my blog. My naming method is always to put the subject in the title. Not a bad method but I feel I’m running out of ideas for creative post title.

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  10. Great post! Thanks for the tip re: strategically trimming down the post’s slug for better clarity and SEO. Makes sense, and I can’t wait to start putting it into practice!

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  11. As always, I really learn something new from The Daily Post! I didn’t even know the term “slug” and I have very little understanding of the google search algorithms. This was really helpful. I definitely find the title to be the most difficult aspect of composing! Lots to think about, so thank you!

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  13. Great info about title length and slug words, Krista. Very helpful, thanks.

    I too love Maria’s titles. They’re interesting, and she offers a good mix of information and intrigue–you usually know what to expect, but not ALL of what to expect. I try to do the same.

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  16. Whoa! This blog looks exactly like my old one! It’s on a completely different topic but it has pretty much the same layout and design. Outstanding choice of colors!

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  19. Krista, I picked up a one small gold nugget buried in rocks. Your tips about crafting the title is truly precious. I’ll keep it installed to my thousandths of article coming. I’m new in blogging but I owe you now my success a lot. Thanks.

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  22. When I post poems, the title comes easily – just a matter of picking a word that relates to the matter.

    If it’s something like a Daily Prompt, which they often are, I try to twist the title so it reflects the prompt words. Other times, I’ll be posting a random thoughts thing, in which case I’ll try to come up with something sort of spur-of-the-moment. Yesterday, for instance: I was posting about going back to summer school after weeks of holiday, so I called the post “And Then You Go To Summer School”. I’m not sure it had the desired effect, but I do enjoy playing with words to title something.

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  26. Technical question: If I change the slug on a post, will that break any links to the post unless I go back and edit each of them? Or am I safe in that regard?

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    1. Hi @Noah, great question. Yes. If you change the slug of a post *after* you’ve published it, any links to that old slug will be broken. You would need to go back and update each old link with the new slug to make sure they work.

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  30. Great post, thank you! I definitely struggle more to create a good title but I learnt that it’s OK if it takes you ages to come up with a title. In fact it’s even better because then you can be more confident that it works. I’m nowhere near where I want to be with my title creation but I’m far better than I was when I first started. It’s a great learning curve! 🙂

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