Welcome to Day 4 of the the How To Drive SEO Traffic To Your Website Challenge!
One of the first thing your target audience will see prior to even clicking through to read the content is your blog post and page titles. Writing catchy headlines that help your audience click through to read what you published is an art that you can learn. It starts with using the right keywords within the first three words, creating a great title URL, using appropriate header (H1) tags, and then continues with the focus on the content that you want them to read.
Check out my top 9 tips to creating better titles.
Tip #1 Don’t Be Clever
Titles are a bad place to use puns and be too clever unless you know for sure your audience will get it. You’ve probably clicked through a title that promised one thing and delivered another and weren’t happy about it. Don’t do that to your audience. The title should describe what the content will cover.
Tip #2 Hook Them In
The title needs to be interesting enough to hook them in to make them want to click through and read. But, it also must be honest. Honesty in titles is very much needed because it trains your audience to trust you. If they click through and read what they thought they’d read they’re going to be more likely to click through again.
Tip #3 Remember the Keywords
Add keywords into the title toward the beginning of the title within the first three words so that the search engines notice it. Plus, it’ll make it clear to your audience what the article or blog post is about and not just the search engines.
Tip #4 The Right Topic
Naturally, you must pick a topic that is relevant to your audience. It doesn’t matter how optimized the title is if your audience is not interested in the information that you want to provide. That’s why you need to know who your audience is so intimately.
Tip #5 Let Them Know Why Read It?
Within the title, you can let your readers know why they need to read the content. Tell them what they’ll learn, tell them something compelling so that they realize there is an important reason to read the information.
Tip #6 Show Them the Value
When you can express a value related to the information within the content of the blog post or other content and can express it some way within the title that is going to help ensure that more people click through the title to gain that value. For example, if you have a process that can save time, qualify that and mention it.
Tip #7 Back Up Claims Made Within the Content
If you can use a source of some kind within the titles that can help a lot. For example, “SEO research reveals this secret increases open rates by 70%.” This type of information makes your audience more likely to read.
Tip #8 Use Numbers Within the Title
Quantifying anything always helps. It can be a list, it can be a percentage or another number that clarifies what’s going to be inside the content. Studies show that numbers increase open rates by more than 30 percent.
Tip #9 Deliver the Goods
The biggest key to ensure that you do good making titles is to create awesome content. The content is just as important as the title. If people click on the title and don’t read what they thought they would they’ll lose trust for you.
One way to help yourself with keyword rich titles is to write your title first. The title can help you define the focus of the article, blog post, or page on your site. That will help you focus the content so that you don’t get too unfocused during content creation.
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