Writing truly effective content titles for the Web is a difficult and challenging skill.

Photo credit: Maslov Yuri

Few are good at this, and the ones that have learned what it takes to do this job right, keep most of their tactics for themselves.

Writing great titles and headlines on the Web is of such enormous value to content publishers that not knowing what it takes to transform titles in perfect content labels can cost them literally thousands of dollars in lost advertising or subscription revenues.

Great titles are worth gold on the Internet but understanding how to create them is not an intuitive task or something that you can learn by emulating what print newspapers and magazines have done for decades.

We are in a completely different ball game.

While in a print newspaper the reader has clearly decided to engage and browse through the publication she is holding in her hands, on the Web this is increasingly less and less the case.

People don't browse so much sites in search for articles that would interest them like they do while browsing a paper. They are sent to other places by recommendations and reviews made by people and sources they trust or they find your content by way of searches on major search engines.

So, if you are after getting the attention of those trusted reviewers, bloggers and newsmakers, or if you want to make way for your content to become more visible on the major search engines, this is what I advise you to do.

My assumptions here are that you want to:

1) Have your content easily found by potential readers searching for it via search engines,

2) Increase your visibility and exposure on the topics you write about,

3) Attract more targeted readers, truly interested in what you have written about.

If this indeed what you are after, then these are the rules you need to use to write great titles for your web articles:

Read more...