Increase Blog Traffic with Obvious Post Titles

There's all sorts of search engine voodoo to bring traffic to your blog and beginning blogger can get overwhelmed quickly.

Here's a quick tip that will boost your search engine juice instantly:

Always Be Obvious

Or to put it a bit bluntly:

Stop Being Clever

The one thing every study of online habits shows is that nobody has any time. I don't have the time to comprehend that your post titled with a reference to Dante's Inferno is really about how to toilet train a cat. If your post is the top five things you wished you knew before you made buttercream frosting then don't use a post title that is more about your cleverness as a writer than about what I'm about to read.

If I see your post title in a Google search or a Twitter tweet I should be completely unsurprised when I click through to read it. I should know exactly what I'm getting myself into. Your post titles should jump out at the right people: 'Yes! That thing you searched for, that topic you're interested in, that idea in your head that you are researching? I'm writing about it right here in language that you will understand!'

The more words and phrases you use in your post titles (and categories, blog title, etc) that people might actually type into a search engine, the better off you'll be.