Article Titles

What are the best article titles? The ones that get the most people to open up that page and read the article. Well that is almost true. The title must be relevant to the topic, or all those readers who were expecting something else will stop reading, and certainly won't be coming to your website. Relevancy is good then, but what else?

Perfect Article Titles?

There are no absolute rules here. A perfect title for a particular article may ignore the "rules." Your judgment is called for, but have a good reason before ignoring the following guidelines. They have served myself and others well.

1. Four to Seven Words in the Title

This is a good guideline, but certainly not absolute. There are very effective two-word titles, and I am considering writing an article titled, "How To Write An Article That Breaks All The Rules And Still Gets Read." Some keyword phrases have five or more words and require a title of more than seven words to fit them in comfortably.

Also, it may actually be the length of the title that is more important than the number of words. In other words, eight short words may take less space than five long ones, and sometimes it is proper display that you want. Why? Because website owners may not want to use your article if the long title doesn't look good on their page. This is not a crucial point, but every little bit helps.

2. Get Their Attention

Article titles should grab the reader's attention. I have an article about travel safety that I rewrote. One version has "Travel Safety Tips" as the title, while the other has the title "Robbed On A Bus In South America." Both contain my true story, but which would you more likely read if you only saw the title?

Now, the problem here is that the searches are being done for "travel safety," so the second version is not likely to be found in the search engine results (there is no traffic for "robbed on a bus"). In cases like these it may make sense to write two similar articles, one to catch keyword searches and another to catch the attention of browsers in article directories. But as much as is possible, you should have the primary keyword in the title and have it be attention-getting as well.

For example, there is traffic for the keyword, "creativity techniques." If you had a website on a related subject, you might like to get some of that traffic. So use the keyword, but make it interesting with a title like "Creativity Techniques Worth A Million Dollars." Then, in the article, you could have an example of a million-dollar product and how the idea was arrived at, or how it could happen using these techniques.

3. Give Them a Reason to Read

Imagine yourself in the reader's place, asking, "Why should I read this?" This is why articles titled "How To..." do so well. The reader knows they will learn something useful. I've done well with titles like "You Can Improve Your IQ Today," and "How To Dream Up A New Invention." Titles that promise some benefit do well.

Another reason to read an article, though, is to not lose or "miss out" on something. For example, if you were to see an article titled "Six Mistakes People Make When Writing Articles," wouldn't you want to read it, just to see if you were making any of those mistakes? That's a strong reason to read.

Continues here... More Tips for Good Article Titles

Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters on the home page.

Writing Tips
Sell E-Books
Writing for Money
Writing an Article
Get Paid to Blog
How to Write Articles
Article Writing Software
How to Write Articles

Involve that Reader!

Some of the more successful article titles are those that involve the reader. Questions do this. Simply using the word "you" is also effective. Some examples:

Are You Making This Writing Mistake?

You Can Write a Better Title Today

How Many Successes Do You Have?

You Can Increase Your IQ Today

Ten Ways You Can Make More Money

How You Can Overcome Writer's Block

You Quit Your Job - Now What?