What Title Tags Work The Best For New Posts

Title Tags That Work For New Posts…

How Much Do Title Tags Matter?

Writing Headlines: Data vs. Insight

Do you let data determine everything?

Balance between compelling titles and click bait

**Dave:** Ah, now we’re on the same page. Yes, I think it’s important to recognize that more than any other element of your article, a headline is the advert, it’s the thing that will hopefully draw people to click and show up on your site to read your piece. So study headlines, look at your direct competitors, make them interesting and don’t forget some of the research-based tricks. Enumerated lists — 10 techniques for crafting the perfect headline — are quite popular with readers, as are the BuzzFeed-esque addition of “and you won’t believe…” or similar teases.
**Tyler**: I actually love these headlines, Dave, even though most people hate them. Actually, that’s not true. If you write a headline like that and deliver me great content, we can be friends. Otherwise, you are on my blacklist.
**Dave:** I’m not a fan of clickbait, but it does work. Remember your comment about being a pragmatic business? Sometimes it’s worth trying out techniques and approaches that aren’t part of your regular playbook. Your readers might hate it, and tell you, but it might drive a significant increase in traffic to your site. How would you know if you don’t test?
**Tyler:** Good point. So if we were to summarize, it might be all quantitative after all: research to find fruitful topic areas, then test variant headlines to see what draws the greatest traffic to your site. Sounds like where I started out, Dave. Data, data, data.
**Dave:** Not exactly, but yes, we have a similar approach in the end. I’ll just add that I try to make my headlines fun or engaging too. Just having keywords, or even enumerated lists with keywords is likely insufficient to get that precious click from the reader, so spend some time pushing words around, trying synonyms and using (or omitting!) jargon and acronyms. Then we can talk about how to write compelling content, right?
**Tyler:** I think that’s fair. I think most content creators are creative by nature, and I certainly don’t want us to remove that from the equation. However, I think these types of folks can benefit a lot from more sophisticated data-driven methods.

Keep the conversation going…

This has been a fun conversation back and forth. If you’d like to ask us some questions below, we’ll keep our conversation on this topic flowing.