If you write articles or blog posts, you could be wasting a lot of time if your titles look like these:

“A Revelation I Had Last Week.”

“What If?”

“Something Interesting.”

What do these titles have in common? They lack a key ingredient (pun intended) — they don’t give me a single clue as to what the content is going to cover! And hence there is absolutely no incentive to click the title to read the article or blog post. I’m likely to simply gloss over them and go to the next tweet, email, etc. This could be fixed with one simple addition: adding a keyword to the title that at least tells me something about what the article is about.

For example, note the difference in these titles now:

“A Revelation I Had Last Week About Intention.”

“What If? An Excellent Marketing Question.”

“Something Interesting In Social Media.”

Aha! Now I at least know what the article will be about, and can make an informed decision of whether to click or not.

There is another very important reason to have keywords in your titles — it’s critical for search engine optimization. Even if your article is chock-full of keywords, because titles are more important to readers, they are also weighted more heavily by the search engines. And keyword-less titles aren’t going to get much, if any, attention in the search engines.

So, take a few moments to look at your own blog post and article titles. Are you sometimes guilty? It’s a quick fix, but easy to overlook if you aren’t thinking about it when you write your title. Make a point to create a title that includes at least one keyword, and you’ll start seeing the difference!

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FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH GUIDE by my esteemed colleague and SEO copywriting pro, Karon Thackston. Karon just made this guide available to her subscribers yesterday. Make sure you get your copy, and use the 5-step guide to help make your keyword research more productive! Demystifying Keyword Research.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 14th, 2010 at 7:15 am and is filed under Copywriting/Writing, Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.