Would this hack work? - human-readability-optimized headline -> keyword-optmized headline

[Plivo]

Hi Moz-ians, I need your insight.

I am thinking of the following hack:

1. Writing the headline of a blogpost as human-readable & catchy as possible and publish on content voting communities like Hacker News. (basically serving human readers the best)

2. After the influx of large traffic, change the title based on the target keywords of the blogpost. (basically serving Google Search Engine the best)

I would like to know whether making such a change after publishing a post would nullify any positive impact I will earn by publishing the post in terms of the search ranking of the page? (=whether it would be a sound strategy.)

I am worried a sudden change in the headline (e.g.,

or

element) would damage the increase in page authority I've gotten through the incoming traffic from, say, Hacker News, which makes this hack not worthwhile to explore.

[crackingmedia]

Hi, I cannot see that this would benefit your site. If you want to attract people to your site then give the people visiting Hacker News the catchy title as the anchor text to the Google friendly title on your site. Then you can do both from the outset.

But in truth whilst smart headlines may increase clickthrough what both human and search engine visitors want is smart content.

Hope that helps

Peter

[KaneJamison]

Seems fine to me. I generally try to avoid doing things like changing a <title>tag and nothing else on the post, but if you do this shortly after posting then I don't think it'll affect much. Of course, it's better if you can find a happy midpoint between the two options.</p> <p>Make sure the URL is done well from the start - you definitely don't want to have to change that.</p> <p>Jason Acidre has a good post on a similar concept: <a href="http://kaiserthesage.com/increase-search-traffic/">http://kaiserthesage.com/increase-search-traffic/</a> and seems to have worked fine for him when just changing the title tag.</p></title>

[Plivo]

Thanks Peter. It's just sometimes very hard to kill two birds with a stone.

[Plivo]

Thanks Kane for sharing the article. There seem to be some communities which have very distinct taste, like Hacker News—I did need a different headline to make it appealing to folks there...

Thanks.