When you meet someone in person, you have only one chance to make a first impression. The same is true for online content. You have one opportunity to grab a visitor’s attention and that is where writing titles and teasers effectively come into play.
Writing Titles – Tips And Techniques
Of course it’s important to attract website traffic, but there’s no reason your titles can’t do double duty by providing good SEO, too.
Use the opportunity to incorporate keywords into page, article, and blog post titles. This accomplishes two important search engine optimisation tasks: it gives search engine crawlers additional keywords to help correctly index the page and it also adds the keywords to the permalink URL.
Now let’s consider how to actually start writing titles. To begin with, make sure that the content is accurately described. If you want to inject a bit of humour that’s fine, but it may be better SEO-wise to save the funny stuff for a subtitle. It won’t typically drive traffic to your content if you use a title that denotes something other than what the piece is about, either. Sure, using a celebrity’s name may get the content lots of notice, but if it’s only a blatant attempt to get visitors to read it and provides no information about the celebrity, you’ve done more harm than good.
Next, think about keyword integration. Try to keep them close to the beginning of the title and consider the type of phrase an actual person would use to find information on the internet. For instance, using the phrase “how to fix your car” is more natural, search-wise, than “automotive repair”. So a good title for an article or blog post might be “How to Fix Your Car: Tips and Tricks from an Expert”.
How To Write Teasers
In a blog post, the teaser is the short meta description. In an article, it might be a lengthier subtitle. On a website page, the meta description also provides a teaser. You can include keywords here, but it is not essential and could even make it look as if you are ‘keyword stuffing’. Natural phrases and flow of words work better since the teaser’s purpose is to entice readers, not crawlers.
Teasers are a way to expand on the title and pique the interest of people surfing the net. They are even more important if someone is browsing through a bookmarking site. The teaser could make the difference between a member taking the time to click on a link to the content or not.
A good teaser does one of several things. It could answer a question. It might mention some piece of recent news. Or the teaser could provide a perception of value. So, effective teasers say things like “Want to become your own boss? Check out these tips for starting your own business”. You can also incorporate something like “As mentioned on the nightly news…” or “These secrets can start saving you money today”.
Do remember to keep a bit of mystery in your teaser, though. Don’t spell out exactly what the reader is going to get. That is the whole purpose of teasing a visitor into reading further.
Writing titles effectively serves dual purposes while good teasers speak directly to people. Remember the difference and it will help you write versions of both.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You are so very, very right. The title pulls me or not, and that is when I guess I make the choice about whether or not to investigate. And it doesn’t take too long to decide whether I want to be there. If I am looking at a page on Google, the description is certainly an important part of my decision making.
Thanks for this post.
Jo Carey-Bradshaw´s last blog ..Empowering Mindset – Mastering Self
I agree Jo, titles and descriptions are both huge parts of your online content. As they say, content is king online, but unless you have a title and description that entices people to follow through to the article, your work may be done in vain.