Making Your Article Headline Shout
Article submission is all about attracting attention. You want people to see your article headline and immediately feel the need to find out what it says about it inside. But where do you draw the line between building interest and out and out deception?
There are several variables you'll want to keep in mind when you design your headline to announce your article. First and foremost you want to keep your headline in line with the relevancy of your key phrases within the article. Anything beyond this will throw off its search engine rankings.
Getting some serious "hang time" for your articles means, not only getting people's attention over a few hours with an initial broadcast, but you want to create a presence that'll last for some time. So keeping the search engines happy is paramount to achieving this goal.
This in itself helps to keep things honest. You won't get much longevity with an article about "dog kennels" if your headline reads "Britney Spears Does It Again!".
If your article is about "dog kennels" then your headline should be also. Now this may seem rather elementary, but you'd be surprised how many authors think only about short term results and forget about the relevancy issues that are so critical to the search engines' functionality.
Good search engine placement comes from having a relevant headline, relevant content, on a relevant web site. If you do a search for any keyword, you'll see the listings with the highest ranking all have the keyword or key phrase in the title, in the first paragraph of the content, in the last paragraph and to some extent in the url.
Scroll down a bit and you'll see all the sites that didn't take heed of this fact.
Another variable would be your target audience. If your writing about a specific topic, you'll already be gleaning the interest of people who'd be seeking information about it. So really, you only have to concern yourself with standing out among other articles geared toward your intended readers.
If you know your topic, which you should, then chances are you can come up with something "catchy" to highlight for a headline. It's possible to go beyond "About Dog Kennels" and still maintain a good relevancy factor.
Here's some ideas for coming up with a good headline . . .
Look through the reference material you're using for your article and draw out the most informative parts. Identify things that may not be common knowledge, or some new element that isn't already spewed out over the web.
Run your keyword to find out what others are using for headlines, and try to make yours more interesting.
Check some of the sites that show the latest trends to see if your topic is among them. Add some of this "late breaking news" into your article and choose a strong idea from that to create your headline.
Do some research on related forums to find out the most asked question some may have about your topic. Build your headline as an answer to that question, or you could fall back on the old reliable "How to . . ." intro that tends to grab people.
Visit places like Yahoo! Answers to see if anyone wants to know specific things about your topic. Read some of the answers too. You might find a really good line or two in there you can use.
So as you can see, there are all sorts of ways you can make a headline stand out without getting too flashy, or being downright dishonest about your content. Remember, poorly thought out headlines might get some attention if they're flashy enough or are designed to draw a large generic crowd. But its relevancy that will bring you the visitors you're really after and will get you some decent longevity with the search engines.
Yes, article submission is all about attracting attention, but you want the right attention from the right people too.