How Effective Post Titles Affect Your Blog?

Currently, I’m doing research for a project and I’ve been asking for websites which accentuate colors. And an online friend; hinching, recommended me Devlounge on Twitter.

@dannyfoo try devlounge.com and have a look at their Friday focus posts. I think there was a colour theme a while back.

Well, it was a great recommendation and I found some ideal stuff to include into my mood board from their Friday Focus archives.

While I was browsing, I noticed their post titles changed from having a date with context to only the date of the issue. What’s the difference? Have a look a for yourself.

If you were browsing the archives of a blog and the post titles didn’t summarize the post content, imagine what you’d have to do. Well, next thing I knew, I had to scan the truncated post excerpts and seriously, that’s time consuming.

So having an effective post title does not only affect SEO. It fundamentally also affects your users who are looking for something.

WordPress WP Greet Box Plugin Downloaded and Activated

The WordPress WP Greet Box plugin creates an automated greeting message to your referred visitors when they read your blog. Yes, referred visitors from search engines, Delicious, Digg and a whole lot more. After activating the plugin, it supports up to 30+ referrer sources.

If you’re a new or existing reader to my blog, you’ll now see an additional panel below the post title.

The other advantageous benefit of this plugin is you may enable an optional close button to this message. And note, this ain’t no annoying popup window. I’d say it disrupts reading glow only a teensy tiny bit.

Other than this plugin, I’d like to note I also find one which highlights the keywords you used in order to reach a blog post very helpful. It quickly drops you hints whether or not the referred search result was accurate.

In addition to the above, blogs (or websites) with multiple authors should have an author introduction below the article. Kind of like this one from Smashing Magazine.

The profile not only would tell a reader who is the author but why, what, where and how this author could’ve been selected to write for you or your organization.

Have you installed or done any of the above for your blog yet?