Close your eyes and picture a quarter pound with cheese. Zero in on the caramelized onions, goat cheese and crispy strips of bacon sitting between two freshly basked sourdough buns. Then imagine it being sold by a burger joint named Bud’s Bland Burgers. Now, Bud’s error may be obvious, but it’s still happening all over the internet today. Thankfully, the solution is simple: when it comes to driving traffic to your business, avoid Bud’s error and create catchy blog titles.

You may have created a Pulitzer Prize-winning article on your site, but if the article’s title is not enticing – or even worse, if the title is boring – then no one will bother to read it. Fewer readers mean fewer visitors, and lower Google rankings. Therefore, creating a champion title for your blog posts should be included in your list of top priorities.

To better understand the impact of content titles, think of them as signs on a busy highway. Naturally, those with catchy signs get more views and visitors; big flashy visuals, attention-grabbing words, and one-of-a-kind titles really do matter in the end. Keep this mindset when you think about your titles.

If you wants to create catchy blog titles, it’s possible. Each site’s content is a puzzle with a solution. Keep reading for three tips to help you crack the code for your site.

Four Tips to Cracking the Blog Title Code

1) Inject unique information into them that will spark the curiosity of your readers. Here are some approaches to creating curiosity-grabbing titles, with examples to help:

• Use words that seem to put the title out of context: “How To Succeed In Google+ Online Marketing Through a Miley Cyrus Song”
• Negate yourself in a proposition: “Coffee Is NOT The Solution To Your Ad Campaign Woes”
• Present your title as a question: “How Can Facebook Embedded Posts Boost Your Sales?”

2) Infuse emotions into your titles. Don’t attempt to make visitors cry with your content titles; give readers a tinge of excitement to work with. After all, online users usually set their sights on things that touch them or affect them in a slightly emotional way. I did a quick Google search and found these INSANELY effective blog titles (see what I did there to attract your attention?):

• “The Shocking Truth About Google’s Search Algorithm”
• “Beware: 5 Things To Avoid In Social Media Management”
• “Mind-Blowing Facts About The Atomic Bomb”

3) If your content topic involves a set of instructions, utilize numbers to create a catchy blog title. Examples include: “10 Ways To Improve Website Speed”, “Top 5 Shortcuts To Winning An Oscar”, or “Three Facebook Pages You Shouldn’t Miss”. It’s simple, people tend to click titles that have a number in them.

4) Keep your title short and sweet. It needs to be concise enough to lead the reader into the main content, but not too long as to occupy three lines on the page. Note: if you can’t read the entire blog title on Google’s search results page, your SEO score is plummeting.

So don’t be like Bud, whose burgers are as delicious as his name his name is bland. Instead, create catchy blog titles, and just like that, viewers will become visitors.

Don’t worry about utilizing all four tips on your first blog post: just choose one, get to writing, and watch your site’s traffic start to shift for the better.