There
is plenty that has been written about search engine optimization and yet
most of it leaves out this very important secret without which no SEO
campaign has any hope of being successful. Folks are concentrating so
much on keywords and keyword phrases that they have forgotten something
much more important and without which, keywords can be virtually useless.
Let us illustrate
this with a common scenario that we all go through fairly frequently.
You enter a keyword phrase at your favorite search engine and the first
page of the results comes through. What do you do next? Do you go to the
first site listed or do you scroll down the listed sites. Most people
do the latter, but what would they be looking for? The answer is simple,
the headline or article title that looks the most relevant to what they
are looking for.
Now let us assume that the site that comes up right at the top, at number
one has a boring uninspiring headline and the site that is number 10 at
the very bottom of the first page has a hot enticing title. What will
happen? But of course No 10 will end up getting all the traffic while
number one will be starved of hits. That is how important headlines are.
So without a good headline al the good SEO work that you put in will not
yield the expected results, even if you do end up right at the top of
results for popular keyword searches.
Why SEO Will Hardly Work Without Powerful Headlines
In fact SEO will hardly work without excellent headlines and titles to
your articles. One of the key aspects about SEO is the accumulation of
back links pointing to your site. Search engines favor this happening
in a natural way rather than you having to purchase links. For this to
happen, your article on the web page will need to get very high traffic
so that when a fraction of these visitors link to your article, you will
quickly end up with thousands or even tens of thousands of links pointing
to your site.
To attract this traffic, a key component of your content will be the headline.
Many stories have been told about headlines making the difference between
a few hundred copies of a supermarket tabloid sold and a couple of millions.
Online headlines are even more critical because many times it is all that
somebody sees before they make a decision on whether or not to click on
a link that will lead to you and your article.
Why Good Headlines Without Keywords Still Work
Many times webmasters have been greatly hindered in their work of creating
suitable article titles by the need to use exact keyword phrases. The
result has been awkward headlines that hardly inspire readership. Yet
those who have realized that it is possible to leave out a keyword phrase
from your headline or to modify it slightly and still succeed in SEO have
greatly benefited.
The truth is that while it is true that your keyword phrase as early as
possible in a headline will help a great deal in terms of SEO, it is in
fact not the only consideration that leading search engines take into
account when deciding how your site will be ranked in search engine results.
More important are the number of relevant back links pointing to your
site. This means that an excellent headline that will attract readership
and ultimately back links to a site is much more important than a poor
headline with the exact keyword phrase slotted in at the beginning of
the headline.
What Is A Good Headline?
A good article title or headline has to be relevant to start with. Never
forget that headlines are supposed to flag down your target readership
and not everybody. This is perhaps the most common mistake people make
when creating headlines. And this is where the webmaster thinks to create
a headline that has as general an appeal as possible. Actually a headline
that seeks to attract everybody quite often ends up attracting nobody.
Excellent Headlines Are The Fuel That Will Drive Your SEO Campaign
Always remember that without good targeted headlines your SEO effort will
most probably come to nothing. It is therefore a good investment to spend
your time studying the art of creating good headlines for your SEO content.
Search engine
optimization is also referred to by similar terms known as: Search engine
marketing, SEO, search engine promotion, SE marketing, SE optimization,
search markeitng, search optimization, search engine optimization, search
engine optimization services, website optimization, search engine clicks,
improved ranking, search engine traffic, marketing on the search engines,
keyword listings, SE promotion, website promtion.