Why Your Next Article Needs an Attention Grabbing Title
One line. One hundred characters. Will your article title survive the cut?
Most article and content writers understand the importance of including keywords in their article titles. They help search engines find your article when people search for those keywords.
But your article title has to do a lot more than get the attention of the search engines.
Your title –that single line of text – has a fraction of a second to convince people to read your article instead of moving onto someone else’s.
Recently, I did a very informal survey in my article marketing forum. I wanted to find out how the members there searched for articles in their favorite directories. Besides using search engines, here are two of the ways people look for articles they need:
1. They scan the list of recently published articles in a directory for a title that catches their attention.
2. They go to a specific article category to find an article title that looks interesting.
Either way, it’s obvious that your article titles matter.
Most article directories will let you use up to 100 characters in your article title. In contrast, many article writers only use three to five words for their titles. That’s usually around only 20 – 25 characters.
I used to be guilty of this myself, until I realized that was one of the reasons no one was reading my articles. I was working hard at producing great content, but my titles weren’t grabbing anyone’s attention. Now I try to come up with long and descriptive titles for all my articles. My articles with the longest, most interesting titles are consistently the ones that get the most views.
So, take advantage of all those 100 characters and convince people your articles are worth reading.
DeniseTopics: Writing that Matters | No Comments »