It’s strange to me that so many bloggers write vague titles for their posts (random examples from my RSS reader: “Fantasyland,” “Optimal Control,” “The Catch-22”). Maybe it’s an aesthetic preference, but the reality is that your blog readers are busy people. Most of them are quickly scanning your blog online or (even worse) scrolling through headlines in an RSS reader. Why not tell them what the post is about? More importantly, if you write specific headlines, some of your posts will generate significant downstream traffic from Google, whereas vague headlines won’t.

For more, see Jakob Nielsen’s 1998 column Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines, which is still exceptionally relevant today.