How to Write Effective Titles for the Web
An article title or headline is your first and sometimes only chance to invite visitors to stay on in your website and read its contents.
Conceiving and eventually writing an effective title is therefore an essential factor in your campaign to capture your target audience. A title is just a phrase, but writing it is one of the most challenging jobs in article writing. It is because titles bear the initial burden of making or breaking your site.
People don’t spend so much time browsing for sites and contents to get the information they want. They rely heavily on search engines which show them pages of websites that bear the text they entered in the search box.
So, if you want to have your content easily seen on the web and attract more readers, then you need to provide your articles with effective, relevant and searchable titles.
Here are some tips that can help you formulate effective titles for your articles on the web:
1. Think like a reader
In order to be able to make eye catching titles that attract search engines as well, you must put yourself in the mind of your readers. The ability to grasp what your target audience would type in the search box will be a big plus for you in creating titles.
2. Use keywords or key phrase in your title
In order to be quickly seen by the search engines, your titles should contain keywords or a key phrase that represent your readers’ searches as well as your article content.
3. Make the title a summary of your content
A title is a show window of your article. It should offer your reader a glimpse of what your article is trying to say, at a glance.
4. Keep your title short and compelling
For most search engines, only the first 10 words of the titles matter. You should try to limit the length of your titles to a maximum of 10 words in order to always be visible to search engines and to capture the interest of your potential readers.
5. Your titles should have the ability to stand alone
As a label or summary of your written content, your title should make sense. It should be able stand on its own and enable your readers to tell what your article is all about even without the rest of the content.
6. Put Names at the end of your title
Searchers who are looking for information regarding specific products, brands, services and organizations often go directly to the website of the organization or the product manufacturer. But if you are writing a review or commentary of a particular product, person or organization, writing qualifying keywords before the name is just fine (e.g. Influence of Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook).