Look at the statistics of it
If you have 100 people who visit your homepage each day out of habit, that’s 100 people who will read your post. A few days of posting later that piece of content is no longer on the front page and it’s now in your archive; so lets say you’ve had 150 people look at it since it got posted. Now, if search engines didn’t exist you’d be lucky to have 5 people read it per day purely by browsing your site. But if you use a good title, you could have 20-30 search hits to that content PER DAY. So 5 days later that SEO friendly search title is bringing in more readers.

Would the homepage visitors not have read it without a friendly title?
If you have readers who visit the site out of habit, would a less organic title put them off? Probably not – provided it was still obvious what the post was about.

Would the search engine visitors have found the post with the friendly title?
Absolutely, but that’s not the point. Using properly researched keywords in your title will help ensure the maximum number of search users are directed at your content. A good search-friendly title can deliver 30 people a day for the next year – that’s a lot of visitors.

Think about the conversions!
30 people to that post every day for a month will be 900 extra potential readers. Even with a 1% conversion rate you’re looking at 9 readers per month and that can really build up. Imagine if you’ve got 20 posts going out per month, each of them picking up 30 visits per day. That’s a lot of new traffic. That’s also a LOT of new potential readers. Now do you see?

#1 – Think about what your content is about
Think about what the message you’re conveying in this post is. What are you trying to tell people about?

#2 – What would you search for to find this post if you needed the information from #1
While you may not be entirely representative of the Internet you at least fit your site’s demographic; so try and think of terms you’d search for to find the information you’re offering.

#3 – Check the keywords
It’s worth doing a quick Google search using the keywords you’re considering to see how competitive they are. If there are 100,000,000 results then it might be worth going for more long-tail words because you’d be buried miles back in those results.

#4 – Remember the rule of search engine listings
It’s better to be #1 for a less-popular search term than #74 for a really popular one. Look at the keywords until you find a combination that seems relevant yet competitive on the search engine results.

#5 – Don’t be afraid of synonyms in the title
It’s a little naughty, but placing alternative search terms into the title (naturally) can really help. For example “how to improve your site’s search engine listings (seo)” allows you to target not only the original keyphrase but combinations that include “seo” too. So make it natural and you should fair slightly better.

Other advantages are that people tend to link back to you using your post title, so if you’ve got a search-friendly one it can be an instant SEO boost for those terms. Remember, 150 readers today pales in comparison to the 30 a day you could receive from the search engines*

*these numbers are just examples, you might have less, you might have more. But they are proportional. Just don’t neglect the SEO future of your content for immediate gain.