Spending Time and Thought on Article Titles Pays

There are many things you can do to promote your article. Tips on SEO, on marketing, on social networking, on linking, and on submitting it on relevant pages can be found all over the net. They all fail if your title is not up to the challenge of tickling the purported reader’s curiosity.

There are several points you have to consider when producing a title.

1.       Keep the title short
Keeping the title of your article short serves two purposes: The attention span of a searcher is minimal. In a long title your chances are you lose him before he reaches the end of it because his eyes are already veering to the next search result. And search engines accord only a limited space to you when displaying search results. Your title might be cut short and what remains look like gibberish or the ravings of a lunatic.

2.       Make the title relevant
Your title should tie in with what you write about. It should also be relevant to your keywords to attract readers to its content. The title “About Cat Pee” might stand out in a search about dog breeding, but I doubt it would find that many readers. If the article is about the cat pee and dog breeding, be a bit more specific.

3.       Make the title pertinent
Your title should reflect on the content of your article. If the title runs “How I Clean Cat Pee of the Sofa” is a list of your failures to do so and a cry for help for someone to come up with a solution, the reader will not be impressed. If on the other hand you present one or several possible solutions, you might get free advertising when someone puts it up on a page about cat pee problems.

4.       A title may be funny
You may indulge in humour in your title if you want to. Don’t be surprised if your article’s content won’t be taken seriously, either, if you do that. You have to be aware of the dangers of using funny titles as well: 90 percent of people won’t share your humour (if you happen to use a widely acceptable strain of it); most won’t get it at all when you try to be funny. Usually it is safer to live out humour in the article where you have unlimited space to explain it to the dense (usually they still don’t get it).

5.       Prioritise
When you apply yourself to your title, keep your priorities in mind. You might notice that the points above are in part contradicting each other. You’ll have to set priorities to get it right.

6.       Compromise
Often you can’t resolve the problems of contradiction at all. Learn to compromise on what you want to say without compromising your work.

If you get it right, you’ll rake in many free views on your articles. My articles rake in a considerable amount of clicks directly from other articles through features that say “If you liked this, why not try this as well?” It is the moment where a snazzy title is worth money just becaue someone felt encouraged to click the link.

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