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Online Article Writing Secrets — How to Make your Article Title Sell

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by: gwydion
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Word Count: 857

It's a shame, but it has to be said that most authors are wasting their time writing scores of high quality articles that end-up only reaching a tiny fraction of their potential target audience.

As someone who writes articles and runs an article directory I know this full well. I'm also a scientist by training and an internet marketer by profession. One thing that these disciplines have shown me is the value of testing, testing and more testing.

If you really want to know what works and what doesn't then you have to compare different versions of what you're doing and see what works and what doesnt. So I've been writing and submitting or testing articles and web pages that differ in layout, differ in content, differ in title and differ in wording, making them simpler or more complex to read.

Out of all this testing the one thing that truly stands out and makes a difference: The Title! Yes, you can have two identical articles but if you change the title one article can have much more traffic than another.

The Reason for the Importance of the Title

Many marketers were trained in classic off-line copywriting. In the off-line world the headling can determine as much as 95% of the success of an article or a publication. The criterion being whether a human reads or buys it. No sale, no success. These rules have been transferred to the internet wholesale.

but the internet is a whole different prospect. And this is because the internet is a completely different delivery system from off-line marketing materials.

The most common myth is what I call the 'bookshop myth'. In this myth it's believed that most people will find and read your article because they came to your website, found it interesting and began browsing (just like people do in a bookstore).

It's All a Lie! The truth is that most content on the internet is found via the search engines. Here people typically type in between 1 and 6 keywords that are related to the topic they're searching for. The search engines then use these keywords to determine the best results from the millions of websites they have indexed.

Typically this is done by matching the keyword against the title of the web page and the first part of the content. It's not even the whole of the title that's important, but the first few words (about 5 words in fact).

To be found for a given set of keywords you need those keywords to be in the first five words of your title and you need those same keywords in the first two sentences (preferably the first sentence) of your article's text. Your article will only be found and read if you can create article titles that include the most commonly searched keywords for the topic of your article!

How do you Determine which Keywords to Use?

The only way to do this is via a keyword research tool. There are lots of them out there, some free and some fee-based. Overture.com has one of the most popular and this shows the most common search results from Yahoo! Regardless which kind of tool you use, you must learn how to perform good keyword research because your article will succeed or fail based entirely on this.

To show you what I mean, look at the following two titles:

Example 'Bad' Title:

Top 9 Ways to Make Digital Photography Pay

Example 'Good' Keyword-rich Title:

Digital Photography Income — 9 Ways to Make More Money with your Digital Camera

The first title wastes the first 5 words with meaningless 'filer' words such as 'top', 'ways', 'to' and the number 9. The meat of the sentence only comes at the end. Even the word 'pay' is weak.

Compare this with the alternate version. The first three words are strong and keyword rich. They strike right at the heart of what the article's all about. A quick keyword search also reveals that those looking for 'digital photography' are also often searching for 'digital camera' so I added that keyword in as well and changed 'income' to 'make money', again to make the title more keyword rich. This increases the chance that the article will be found by more potential visitors searching for alternate keywords.

You will notice that the only special character I have in the title is the m-rule separator. Basically don't put asterisks, chevrons, tildes or anything else in the title that makes it more difficult for the search engines to work out what the title's about. What you have to remember is that you're writing your title primarily for indexing by the search engines and only then for reading by people.

Never, ever, engage in the despicable 'black hat' SEO practice of writing a keyword-rich title that has nothing to do with the articles content. The search engines are wise to this practice and already aggressively filter-out such results.

Adhere to these rules and you will have intelligent, keyword-rich article titles that the search engines will absolutely love. Your pay-off for the effort involved will be articles that more people will see and read and you will get more traffic both to your website and to your article.

About the Author

In a very varied career, Dyfed Lloyd Evans has been a magazine editor and a writer. He now runs the Celtnet Articles site where anyone can publish their articles and articles are available for use in eZines and on-line. He also runs the successful Celtnet WebInfo eZine offering tips to all as to how they can successfully monetize their website.

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