How To Create Eye Popping Titles That Catch The Reader’s Attention

Posted: July 27th, 2009 | Filed under: How-To Comment

Whether you are looking for traffic from search engines, others sites, or even within your own, the title of your article or page usually has a large part of determining if people want to visit your site or not.

Big picture there is really nothing wrong with a nice descriptive title as long as it can covey what the article is about, but a short bland title really won’t improve your chances of somebody actually wasting their time and visiting your article.

Before we can really start to dive into what makes a good title, there are two key points to remember when creating catchy title… Are you creating a title for search engines or social networks?

There is no real easy and concise way to breakdown why you would want to differentiate the two, but it should become clear after reading this article.

The Ultimate Title Template

Everybody has their own brand of creativity, but you can never go wrong with your post title by following this formula (great for lists).

[Number] [Ways, Steps, or Synonyms] To [Power Word] [Subject]

Examples:

• 8 Ways To Dominate Your Niche
• 10 Sites That Make Learning Web Design Super Easy
• 4 Brainless Ways To Build Massive Biceps

As you can see by the examples, the template can be rearranged and tweaked, but overall you can see the final goal. These type of titles work well for both search and social networks as people always are intrigued with lists.

The Lazy Man’s Title Template

I don’t care who you are, we all enjoy something easy, so why not imply that in your title.

The [Synonyms for Lazy, Easy] [Audience's] Guide To [Subject]

Examples

• The Lazy Trader’s Guide To Stock Trading
• A Mind-blowing Easy Way To Increase Your Bench Press

These type of titles work well in both search engines and social networks, and if content is up to par, it can also be great link bait content.

The What?!? Title Template

Sometimes we just want to people to click on our link and read the article. While we could easily use any of the above title templates, sometimes confusion is the best recipe for gaining interest in your article. People don’t like to be confused, so they will be more likely to at least see what your article is about.

Examples:

• How I Went Bankrupt In 3 Days
• How To Go From Pee Wee To The Hulk
• How To Take Your Career Off Life Support

Depending on how strange you may get, these type of titles don’t always perform the best in searches; however, they can work better on social networks than any of the templates above.

Combination Title Templates

In a perfect world we would like to use titles that are best optimized for search engines and social networks at the same time, and thanks to platforms like Wordpress we can do this.

Within Wordpress, you have the option of having an actual post article be different from your permalink by editing the slug.

Using this same notion we can also have our actual article title be different from our social network article title. When necessary make sure to use all these options to their fullest extent.

When it comes to sharing, retweeting, or publishing your article the title is almost always the first line people will ever see. What good is a list of “100 powerful free resources” if nobody even knows about it by reading your title?

For further research on dissecting what type of articles and posts work, check out Case Study: How To Attract People To Your Site.

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