untitled.

A couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to participate in WordCamp Denver. The night before, there was a speakers/VIP dinner, which was awesome because so many of my friends where there.

Among the crew was Ben Huh of Pet Holdings (they run the ICanHasCheezburger network) and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic (they run WordPress). The three of us got to talking about post titles (of all things).

Ben talked about how he had a team of moderators whose job it was to read and curate all the submissions to the various Pet Holdings sites. He expressed the difficulty that exists with matching posts to each other because of the unique language used to title and tag everything.

Matt talked about how they measured the importance of the title of posts in increasing readership, and how they noticed that some people were really masters at writing titles. Matt mentioned that the title was something he left to the end (as do most bloggers), and it was something that he felt that he could improve on.

For me, I explained that I love writing titles and that often I dont write the post until the title forms in my brain. That for me, the post is driven by the title, rather than the opposite.

As the weeks past, this conversation continued to replay itself in my brain.

“Why are titles so important?”

When I did SEO full-time, I spent a lot of time building title tags for clients. The title on the page became the clickable link within the search results that (hopefully) was interesting enough for the searcher to click on and drive meaningful traffic to the client’s site.

I had a newspaper client. We used to talk a lot about how newspapers, by definition, were always a day late with news. Therefore the headlines would assume that you already knew what was going on.

Instead of: “Challenger Space Shuttle Explodes to the Horror of Many”

You would get: “Tragedy in the Sky”

Which works better for blog posts?

I am no journalist. I rarely write about events (apparently you can get sick if you kiss a pig?) current or otherwise. My titles should be interesting enough, that people are open to reading the rest of the post. My titles are the marquee. The post is the drinks served inside. (Comments are when someone decides to buy me a drink…I could on forever with this analogy…)

For me, titles are the most fun part of writing, and the most important. Since I dont have a “big” name and people dont read my posts simply because I wrote them, my titles need to be compelling enough to draw readers in.

Here are my three rules of title writing:

1) Is the first word I utter after reading a title: “interesting”? Then its a good title.

2) Would I conclude my post with the title? Then its a good title.

3) Am I disappointed in the post after reading the title? Then the title sucks.

I tend to keep titles to 5-7 words max. I tend to use mixed case. I tend to not care about the SEO of the title. I tend to change my title as the post grows.

There has to be more than that, right? Why do people fret so much over the titles that they write?

For most people, they spend a lot of time writing and researching their posts. A bad title could reduce readership significantly, while a great title could drive readership through the roof.

After all, the game of blog writing is engaging your readers. If you cant engage them by the titles of the posts you write, then most likely, your posts will also be less engaging.

Here is another tip: If you saw your title in the middle of 10 other similar titles (say on a Lijit or Google SERP), would you click on it?