The Importance of Titles in Article Writing

Why are titles so important when writing articles for online marketing? Surely a single line of a few words can't make a whole heap of difference to a search engine? If the article is packed full of the right stuff, then isn't a title just a little bit like the envelope a letter comes in? Something that's perhaps glanced at briefly, but ultimately fairly unimportant? If this is how you feel about article writing and creating SEO content then either you're in the wrong business, or you're making my job a great deal easier, because my articles will be out-performing yours by such a huge factor you may as well not be writing any at all. Titles are one of the most critical parts of any SEO article, and for several good reasons. First of all, the majority of articles in article directories are discovered by those looking for information through the search engines. A keyword search will result in a great long list of possible results - often thousands or even millions of them. The most visually striking element within the search results listings are the titles. These are either the titles of the web pages, or the titles of the articles. This means that the first thing anyone is likely to see is the title of your article. If it stands out and looks interesting and relevant then perhaps some people might glance down at the couple of lines underneath it, which will generally be taken from your summary or teaser section. Only if this seems relevant will people click on the link and read your article. This means that if you fail with your title, then your entire article fails, because no one will click on the link. The same is true for those people who find your article by browsing a list of recently published articles on any particular directory, or a list of recent blog posts. There's simply too much information on the web for people to give seemingly irrelevant or uninteresting content much more than a cursory glance. If you don't capture their interest immediately, someone else will. Titles are also a key part of the whole search engine optimization process, because the search engines will often use the title to determine the contextual relevance of the article. It's generally agreed that having your keyword or key phrase towards the beginning of your article works best, giving your article the best chance of being picked up and indexed quickly for the right keywords. Titles need to be optimized for both the search engines and real people. Fail to spend enough time and effort on your titles and you could lose both, leaving you with a whole page of words nobody's ever going to see.