Little SEO Secret about Headlines

Folks are concentrating so much on using keywords and keyword phrases that they have forgotten something much more important and without which keywords can be virtually useless.

Lets 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 all 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.

Terry P. Detty acknowledges that his Search Engine Marketing and his Email Marketing program are a couple of his passions in life.