When it comes to getting and keeping more readers, titles are the most important part of a blog post.

What happens when you post to your blog then go back and edit the post? Usually the result is that your blog becomes better than it was before but when it comes to editing the titles of your blog posts the results can be worse instead of better.

There's hardly a day that goes by that I don't discover a blog post who's author has edited the title and lost readers because of his or her editing. On any blog platform worth using, the title you give your blog post becomes part of the URL of that post. This is called "Search Engine Friendly Titles" or "Search Engine Optimized Titles."  Sure, we could name our post http://bloggingpoet.squarespace.com/3-19-2008/post=403 but who uses Google to search for /3-19-2008/post=403? Who uses any search engine to search for /3-19-2008/post=403? But if your title contains the words, "hot babes in boyland" then someone searching for "hot babes in boyland" just might find your blog post.

That is: unless you change your title.

You see, the minute you click "publish" your blog post is fired not only to the front page of your blog but world wide to thousands of RSS feed readers, aggregators and other places like search engines but when you edit your title you change the URL of your blog post which means that anyone who is following the first link back to your blog will hit a wall known as an "Error 404 Page Not Found On This Website" notice. And what do most readers do when they encounter an Error 404 page? If you guessed they simply go looking for another website or blog then you'd be correct.

So think hard about those titles, spell check before posting and do your best to get it right the first time. But whatever you do, don't ebit your bolg titles.