The Headline Split Tester plugin for WordPress is an interesting idea. It allows you to test an alternate headline for any of your posts to see which one generates the most clicks.
The plugin is developed by bhalliburton and peterbessman.
You install the plugin in the usual way and set the alternate headline in the box that appears underneath the post editing box.
The only other option to change is the number of impressions before deciding which headline works best. The default is 250.
This plugin is a great idea, but my only concern is the impact it may or may not have on SEO. So far I’ve tested it on one post, this is the result.
As you can see the page URL has not changed, apart from the addition of “?isalt=1” for the purpose of the test, but the headline has.
As headlines are so important for attracting peoples attention and drawing them into your blog I think it’s definitely worth trying out this plugin. The alternative headline is also displayed in RSS feed readers, as you can see here (I use the Feedly extension for Chrome):
This is a nice plugin indeed, I am doing something similar, in a more manual way, with Twitter headlines for my blog posts, Tweeting them with different headlines and monitoring the results with Google Analytics Campaigns – I use a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of everything.
The SEO really worries me as well, would it be too much to ask for a post update once you have more solid results on that end?
Thanks for sharing this finding.
Yes, I’ll post an update when I’ve had the plugin running for a few days. So far I am seeing some very interesting results with the alternate headline, which I would consider to be an attention grabbing headline rather than an SEO headline, is getting more clicks.
One to watch for sure.
Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment.
I am also a little worried about this plugin, Could it create duplicate content on your site ?. I am trying it anyway for a while and hope to see how you work out with it also.
I don’t think it would cause duplicate content. I haven’t experimented enough with the plugin yet, but I’ve tried using an SEO headline and an attention grabbing headline on a couple of posts. The attention grabbing headline has brought in more traffic in the short term, which you would expect. Whether that translates to more links (and therefore better overall SEO) remains to be seen.
It’s definitely worth trying out for a month or so. I would be interested to hear how you get on if you continue to use it.
So can anyone give an update on this plugin? Someone I work with has a blog that he emails once a week to send to his blog posts. If we used this plugin we would have to put the link to both headlines into our emails to see which one gets more clicks in an email message. Is there some other way to use it?
I stopped using it after a week or so because the original URL and the alternate URL (with “?isalt=1” added) where both indexed in Google. It’s true, I could have set up redirects from one to the other, but it seemed like a lot of effort to go through every time I published a new post.
I’m not sure how it works in emails…but in the blog environment and in RSS feeds visitors see different headlines for the same post and the plugin counts the clicks to see which of the two headlines attracts the most click throughs.