Writing Article Headlines

3 Steps To Writing Article Headlines That Will Generate Traffic

The article headline is the most important part of the article writing process, or any other online marketing venture that you are involved in. If you choose a phrase for your article title or headline that is not searched for, it is likely your article will not get much traffic. Follow these 3 easy steps to writing a catchy headline and you will be on your way to generating more traffic to your website.

GETTING IDEAS
Consider the main idea of your article and make a short list of keywords that relate to what you are writing about. Using the free keyword tools available on the internet, type in your keywords, then create a second list of the keyword phrases that are generating traffic. Before moving on, you should have at least 10-20 keyword phrases that we will use for our research. You can add, remove, or change words from your keyword phrases to create another idea for your headline.

RESEARCHING
Now that we have several keyword phrases, we need to find the one that is popular, but not already plastered all over the web. Start at the top of your keyword list, and begin searching Google for the phrase using quotations ("keyword phrase"). Take note of the optimized results. This is the number at the top right of the search results. Now count the number of ads listed on the right side of the page. Move on to they next keyword phrase, and continue this process until you have done a search for all of your phrases.

CHOOSE YOUR ARTICLE HEADLINE
For article marketing, we need to take into consideration that different article directories have different requirements. A good rule of thumb is any keyword phrase with 1,000-5,000 optimized results (we should have this written down next to our keywords) and at least a few paid ads will be a good title for our article. If you find more than one with optimized results in our range, I would recommend using the one with the most paid ads. Don't get excited if you find one with 10 or 20 optimized results unless there are paid ads; chances are it is not a highly searched phrase. For large article directories such as EzineArticles, you can probably use a keyword phrase with up to 10,000 optimized results. I would not recommend going any higher than that, as you will most likely not get lucky enough to end up on the first page of Google, and in turn, not get much traffic.

There is really not a lot of work that goes into choosing a headline for your article. Just follow these 3 steps for every article that your write, search Google within 24 hours for your article headline, and look for your listing on the first page.