Writing Techniques for Title Optimization

It may sound obvious yet the first thing that people will notice about your online article is the title. This is make or break time and as a writer, how your article title is delivered can turn your visitors away or bring them in. A good article title is also vital for getting your article discovered in the first place and one that is written with keywords in mind and is appropriate to the content will have a greater chance of being discovered by the search engines.

I used to write down an article title and then build up the article around this central idea. I currently do not work this way, in fact I now do the opposite.

I obviously have a main idea that I wish to write about and so the first thing I will do is to map the article out on a piece of paper. Article mapping is something that I find extremely useful in my writing. Details of this method can be found in How To Write An Outline.

The next stage is then to open up your text editor and, using your article outlines, write the article with paragraphs relating to the sections you have on your piece of paper. At this point do not even think of the title, simply write the article with these main points in mind and allow your writing to flow and create.

In many ways this takes a lot of the pressure of article writing away for you are not bound by the restrictions of the title, since there isn't one! Obviously keeping the article outline in mind is important to keep the main subject active however, the title will come once the article is written.

Actually there is nothing wrong with simply writing whatever comes to mind without any structure at all. You will be amazed at what article ideas your mind can come up with.

So you have now written a good article but have no title. Now you can go to a keyword tool, such as one supplied by Google adwords, paste in your text and see what keywords show up from what you have written. You can then build up your article title from these keywords. This will ensure that your article title is written with relevance to the keywords and will increase the chance of your article being discovered by the all important search engines.

Now obviously you will still want to write a compelling title. For example, let us say you have written an article about making an omelette. You paste your keywords into the keyword tool and omelette does not feature. So we need to go back and revise the article body.

Let us now pretend that "omelette","dinner party","Spanish","free range" and "non stick" appear. From these phrases you can now write a good title. Obviously it will not work if you just string the words together, however a little creativity can yield something usable and interesting.

Perhaps "Easy Spanish Omelette For Your Next Dinner Party" or "Make the Perfect Omelette with Free Range Eggs". As you can see there are many opportunities available to write an interesting article.

As for structure, writing your article title in capitals and without a period at the end is a good idea. Other than the occasional comma, using punctuation should be avoided as well as starting with words such as "the" or "a". Including two good quality keywords in your article title will help it be discovered and will be relevant to your readers needs. This will greatly increase its chance of being read and not just skipped over.

These then are very basic but powerful tools for writing a good article title. Once your visitor has discovered your title you then want them to read the article. A good title will enable just that.