It is (rightfully) said that titles are the most important part of the internet article. You know the type of content I’m talking about. They’re short articles, usually 500-1000 words, found everywhere online, and on every subject. But, some perform well, others don’t. And it doesn’t always have to do with the traffic of the site that hosts the content.
Good titles are like first impressions: you know a good one when you experience it. And as with bad impressions, bad post titles are hard to get past. The reader rarely clicks through to get to know the article beneath the lead. But once you’ve convinced a reader to click through the title, you’re much, much more likely to generate marketable behaviors from this point on. So, the question is, how do we write these things? The answers are a little more complex than you might think.
For one, a dazzling headline can shoot you in the foot if the material itself doesn’t deliver. Instead, choose an accurate headline. For instance “5 Fruits that Cure Cancer” might seem like the sort of information that a lot of people want to know, if you’re not able to actually provide this content, it’s best to scale down the claims generated by your headline. In the same way, the quality of your content should be constructed so that it yields dedicated readership over time. If you consistently provide good, valuable content, it’s going to lend credibility to your titles, making people much more likely to click and share them than if they encountered them for the first time. In this way, SEO is both an art and a science. Belfast SEO can provide you all the tips and tricks you need to optimize your content for maximum exposure, but it’s important to give each article a firm foundation of content quality to develop a following.
So pick a good headline, and make sure it contains phrases that people will actually search for. For instance, in this title I used the phrase “Clickable Titles” something that a simple search will show you people search for on Google quite a lot. Hopefully, with the combination of this website’s exposure and my writing efforts, this post will be seen by hundreds, thousands, or more people. Working with a specific site, blog, or client can help you figure out the kind of titles that work best for individual audiences.
Finally, you want to give your titles some indication of the sort of content that the audience is ultimately going to view. People like this, because it helps them know that by clicking your title, they’re not going to be wasting their time. In the article I’ve just written I put “3 Ways” in the title so that the readers know they will be finding three specific recommendations, enough to take in quickly and digest. If I had an infographic, [infographic] would be appropriate to put at the end.
In every case, accuracy, personality, and communication are the ideals of the perfect title. If your title doesn’t seem right in any of these ways, it’s probably not a good title. Also, it’s OK to underpromise and overdeliver. If you have a somewhat humble title that has banging content, it might just catch on. Play around with it. You’ll master excellent titling in no time.
