Length of Article Title Research
Under a variation in my name, “C. Michael Knight” — I created 2 niche articles about a 1973 Trans Am hobby website and posted them on EzineArticles about 90 days ago (May 15th, 2006).
Article Marketing Research Conclusion: A Longer article title resulted in a 56% higher distribution and a 147% higher actual qualified visitors referred over a shorter article title article on the same topic.
The 2 articles being evaluated in this research:
Article 1 (1973 Trans Am – Pontiac’s 455 Super Duty)
Article 2 (73 Trans Am – Pontiac’s Screaming Chicken and Its Shaker Scoop)
The Search Engine Inclusion Analysis:
Article #1 when searched for came back with 4 inclusions in Google, 105 in Yahoo and 18 in MSN for a total top 3 search engine inclusion score of 127.
VS.
Article #2 when searched for came back with 73 inclusions in Google, 560 in Yahoo of which I believe 82 are real because of Yahoo’s handling of the apostrophe in the title, and 301 inclusions in MSN (of which I believe 44 is a more accurate representation if MSN’s algo’s are similar to Yahoo’s in terms of the apostrophe variance). Total top 3 search engine inclusion score of 199.
Article #2 outperformed Article #1 by 72 more inclusions (56% better).
Yes, I know that this isn’t a fair metric as I’m only evaluating 2 articles (hardly statistically accurate) in 3 search engines. Work with me people. :)
Going back to May 15th of this year when I posted these two articles, I didn’t do them for this research test as I just wanted to put 2 articles out there to help me find a very rare muscle car that I’d like to buy some day.
The longer article title out-pulling the shorter article title did not surprise me… but the fact that in the greater majority of the daily notifications that I receive from new inclusions of my 2 articles are of authority sites and not non-relevant non-authority sites is very encouraging.
An “authority site” is any site that reprints my articles that only contains articles or topics that are near identical to that of mine. The narrower the focus, the more authoritative the reprint value becomes to me because I know that the result will be traffic from a very qualified visitor.
Lastly, something else surprised me:
Even though the longer length Article #2 outperformed Article #1 in terms of search engine inclusion metrics by 56%, Article #1 has 1,023 page views vs. Article #2’s 307 page views on EzineArticles.com alone, a difference of 233%! Confused yet?
To see what’s really important, I then moved to look at my July 2006 total web stats to see which article (1 or 2) from all of the syndicated reprints produced the most referrals. 42 referrals for article #2 vs. 17 referrals for article #1. Article #2 outperforms article #1 by 147% in terms of ability to drive traffic to the website.
Net result: Even though the shorter length title on EzineArticles.com outperformed the longer title, the longer title article still attracted a higher distribution (56% more) and a higher actual traffic referred power (147% more).
Are you convinced yet about the traffic attraction power of extending the length of your article titles?
This is interesting information Chris – it confirms something I noticed about one of my own articles with a really long and comparatively unattractive title – but that attracted loads of visitors. Reckon I’ll try it out on a few more of my own articles and see how it works for me!
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