by Gene Patterson

Created on: November 09, 2010

A snappy article title isn’t important for an article; it may be everything.  You could have a brilliant piece of prose hiding behind a boring and dull title and no one is likely to see it.  Grabbing your audience’s attention is paramount.

♦  Use words that paint a picture

An article headline can be like poetry.  Sometimes simple and neat works the best other times it can be chock full of descriptive terms.  Adjectives in an article tend to be bad things.  You do not need to tell me it is “stunning” show me with your writing.  But in a title a word like stunning, amazing, vibrant make great words.  Even a negative title can work, like this , “The malodorous stink of crappy article titles”

♦  Numbers and statistics:

75% of all statistics are BS.  Remember that!  If you have (real) stats they can pop for a headline.  Example: “Researchers say 45% of headline titles put people to sleep”

♦  Promise: 

You must be able to carry through on your headline promises.  DO not try, “reading this article is worth 100$ a day” unless you have a method to make that true.  Personally I know that in a career learning how to write good headline may be worth far more than that, but it would be hard to say this article alone could be with that.

♦  Current events: 

All articles should not employ current events.  A current event reference ties it to a time period and puts a ticking clock on how long people will care to read it.  If my article was something like “Barrack Obama elected because of great Twitter Titles”  I would seem way dated and like him or hate him no one would care to read it because it was OLD news.

ON the other hand an article that is timely and ties to current news can possibly go viral and give you a HUGE burst or readers for the few days it is timely.  Best scenario is to mix in a few timely ones now and again, but not too many

♦  Guide/beginners/expert/Advanced

Personally I like these for marquee items.  When I have written enough to consider it a fullblown “guide” of some sort.  For me that break is about 2000 words.  I expect to end this article around 500, so with a lot more information and true step-by-step, I could consider this a “guide” and “Beginners Guide to Butt-Kicking Titles that will make your Readers Happy” might be a fair title

♦  Lists

Nothing much to say about lists, except people love them.  They know they will be scanable and easy to read, so “Ten Methods to Write Killer Titles” would be a homerun.

♦  Controversy

Controversy is always good. Unless you overuse it.  Do not be controversial in every title but challenging a preconceived notion, whether you ultimately agree or disagree can draw people in.  A controversial title that would work here is, “SEO is Pointless for Online Article Titles”

♦  Importance of SEO for article titles

That last one is controversial because most people do agree SEO plays an important part in article titles.  There are basically two people you are trying to please with each title, a computer (Google SERP results) and a person.  My personal opinion is that the person comes first, but if you can fit your important keywords in, all the better.  This is something that it may be a good idea to mix an article in every so often more geared toward SEO , so that you really get all bases covered.

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