Hubpages' Title Tuner - Does it work? - An Article
I have some Hubs which have been fairly successful and some that have been less than. I decided to explore further into what I can do to make what I view as quality Hubs, better. I discovered the Title Tuner, which I had never really paid much mind to in the past. After asking around on Hubpages as to whether or not it worked, I received a varied response.
With some saying Yay! and some saying Nay! - the only way to find my answer was to try it myself!
To find the Title Tuner, go to the black bar at the top of HubPages, on the right hand side. It will say your Hubname. If you hover your arrow over it, a drop-down menu appears. The first selection is "my account", which is the selection to take.
Once viewing your account, you should notice this is where your earnings are listed, your Hub views, as well as a menu on the top to the left. This menu will list things like "Statistics", "Earnings", "Groups", and sure enough, "Title Tuner".
It will take a moment for it to load as it sifts through your articles and tests it's Google-worthiness. For my purposes, it came up with six titles.
Experimental Hubs
Here are my six titles Title Tuner suggested I alter to make it more Google-friendly. So you can get an idea of the range of my hubs, I'll list the amount of views they have and how long ago it was that I published them.
Gone With the Wind: A Tale of Survival - 83 views - published 12/25/2012
"Wheat Belly" Review - 4,322 views - published 03/08/2012
Legalization of Marijuana vs. The Right to Bear Arms - 158 views - published 12/16/2012
Human Nature vs. Our Nature - 108 views - published 9/12/2012
Tarot's Empress - 244 views - published 8/22/2012
Tarot's High Priestess - 334 views - published 8/17/2012
Some of these have good Google Search Engine terms - such as "Wheat Belly", which is a book which was a hot topic for a moment, which is why it reached such high views in such a short time. Others are fairly generic - such as "Tarot", "Human Nature", etc. There is a specific viewer that will generally search these topics, which could be why they haven't had very drastic views.
Changing and Re-changing to the Hubpages Title Tuner
When confronted with this list, I began making my way down.
Gone with the Wind: a Tale of Survival:
When I clicked on my title, a few words came up with percentages next to them. These percentages I believe are the effectiveness in a Google Search Engine. I had three of them suggested, each with a 50% rating: My, Favorite, and Book.
Taking the obvious suggestion, I altered the title to "My Favorite Book - Gone with the Wind: A Tale of Survival"
"Wheat Belly": A Review:
This book had surprised me that it came up on the Title Tuner. I thought that with Wheat Belly being such a widely recognized and popular book, the title would be short and sweat and get the point across as to what the Hub was about.
Only one word was suggested, that word being "Chromosome" with 100% next to it. I made a quick alteration: "'Wheat Belly' Review - Exploring Our Chromosomes with What We Eat".
Legalizing Marijuana vs. The Right to Bear Arms:
I chose this title because at the time, marijuana in Washington State had just become legal, and there was the tragedy of the school shootings. There were huge debates going on - should we still be able to have guns? Should a state be able to decided to legalize something that is not federally legal? These were hot topics, and thus I thought the terms I used would be hot as well. Apparently my thoughts weren't quite on the money. The term suggested was "Weed" at 100%. My article comparing the two rights then became "Legal Weed vs Legal Guns".
Human Nature vs. Our Nature:
This one I was rather intrigued to chose. I really liked the terms it suggested, and I actually did think that it would help the views of this Hub. The suggested words were each at 100%, and were "Biological", "Social" and "Programming". This got my thoughts going for a whole new approach to this Hub - but for the sake of the accuracy of this comparison, I will wait to edit this Hub until my experiment is complete. The new title is "Biological Programming vs. Social Conditioning".
Tarot's High Priestess
I couldn't really think as to how to improve this title, though I had thought it before about my Tarot series. Title Tuner couldn't really help me much either. The words it suggested were a dash at 50%, "Hubpages" 50%, "Love" 50%, and "Outcome" 50%. At first I didn't change it, but when it was suggested again, I gave in and altered my title to "For the Love of Tarot - The High Priestess Outcome"
Tarot's Empress
I would have thought that with the title being so similar to other in my Tarot series, I would have the same suggestions. I, in fact, did not. The words that were suggested to me were "Hubpages" again at 100%, " Emperess" 100% and "In" 100%. I wasn't sure really as to how to respond to the suggestion of the miss-spelled word. So I instead took the suggestions for the High Priestess Hub and altered it to "For the Love of Tarot - The Empress Outcome"
Further Title Tuning Suggestions
Some of these were not enough. I found myself having to alter these titles again when I went back to the Title Tuner specifically for this Hub! For "Biological Programing Vs. Social Conditioning", it suggested I added the words - at a 100% each - "What", "Does", and "Mean". For my "Legal Weed Vs. Legal Guns" it seemed adamant that I introduce the word "Cigarettes" in this equation. I refused this suggestion simply because cigarettes don't even come into the Hub. And finally, Title Tuner suggested a new spelling for "My Favorite Book - Gone with The Wind: A Tale of Survival". It suggested I alter the spelling by adding a "u" into "Favorite". I declined this suggestion as well.
The first 24 hours
In the first ten minutes of me altering my title, my Empress Hub got a new view, as did my review of Gone With The Wind, while my review of Wheat Belly got three new views - though that can hardly be counted as it generally gets at least a couple views in a day.
By the next morning of the 24 hour period, one of my newly titled Hubs had a view while my
Wheat Belly stood still at only five views. So far, I had yet to see a difference.
Have You Been Successful with Title Tuner?
The Experiment Continues
By the end of day three, even before looking at my views I was already decided that Title Tuner probably was useful to some who in general didn't have strong titles, but over all wasn't the best way to invest time.
And at this point I had yet to be wowed. Not a whole lot had changed. I had six new views on my Hub about Wheat Belly as well as the odd view here or there on some of the other ones, but at this point, nothing to get excited about.
To test out how well my Hubs were titled, I decided to try a new approach. I Googled the Topics.
This is no easy task, knowing the title of something and trying to search for it without actually writing in the title. At first, I searched Gone with the Wind, but came up with movie reviews. I then searched "My favorite book Gone with the wind", and it was the fourth one down on the first page. I felt like that was cheating though, as that is 2/3 the title.
I then searched "wheat", "chromosomes" and "diet" - and sure enough, my hub was on the first page, though down a ways!
I searched "tarot", "empress" and "love", and found my hub on the second page.
I did not however find anything when I searched "Programming" and "conditioning". "Biological Programming vs. Social Conditioning" seems like a very specific title. I tried simply "Biological Programming", and found nothing and gave up after getting to the fourth page. I tried "Social Conditioning" which yielded the same results.
"Legal Weed vs. Legal Guns" was far too broad to be able to find something specific. Of course, what the title was before was just as broad, but it did have a specific phrasing to stand out. I don't think it is any more likely to stand out when being searched for, unless I find obscure wording, but even then, some one would be in need of searching for that obscure wording.
The Result
After a week of writing this Hub, and well - I will admit, I certainly lost track of the days, forgetting which day I started watching, then getting distracted with the pesky non-writing world, here are my results:
My Favorite Book: Gone With The Wind - A Tale of survival
| Biological Programming vs. Social Conditioning: What does it mean?
| For the Love of Tarot - the Empress Outcome
| For the Love of Tarot - High Priestess Outcome
| "Wheat Belly" Review: Exploring our Chromosomes With What We Eat
| Legal Weed vs. Legal Guns
| |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Views at Start
| 83
| 108
| 211
| 334
| 4,322
| 158
|
Views at End
| 86
| 108
| 225
| 357
| 4,336
| 159
|
Total New views
| 3
| 0
| 14
| 23
| 14
| 1
|
I suppose to have made this experiment fully rounded, I should have tracked the progress of these Hubs before changing the titles for a week for something to compare too.
However, I can say in all honesty that it did not make a difference to any of the view rates of my Hubs with the exception of the Hubs about tarot.
I am by no means suggesting that Title Tuner doesn't work - there are a great many factors which could alter the outcome. Perhaps, while I used the suggested Search Engine Optimized words, I didn't put them in a particularly SEO order. Or perhaps I did not allow time long enough to acquire accurate results.
Out of my own curiosity, I ran the Title Tuner one last time, for week-old-times' sake. It suggested altering my titles for my two tarot Hubs, to add in the words "Hubpages" and "in", and continued to suggest "cigarettes" as an addition to my "Legal Weed vs. Legal Guns" Hub.
Over all, I think that I will continue with my Title-Tuning experiment. However, in the mean time, there are a couple titles I need to return to their original glory.