Writing for the internet defies many of the tactics used in print media to gain attention. In fact the two styles are drastically different.  With the billions of content in all forms that exist on the internet your goal should always be to draw the largest audience, but even more important is targeting the right audience.  By targeting the right audience we give our article an opportunity to gain the largest audience.   The way we do this is not by writing enticing headlines that give “shock factor” or even those that use cliches. Though they may represent an idea in our article, they also land our articles in searches unrelated to our content, and ensure your content is read by very few. 

Though many factors of your content writing will play a part in its popularity overall our main goal should be – to draw attention to it. Our second goal and one that is often overlooked in many forms of internet marketing is – to get your audience to read it, or what I call “article conversion.”  In order to do this effectively within “search” we must title our content correctly. Arguably the single most important ingredient to its visibility, it is often where many go wrong. Imperative to your success of writing content that draws attention is the use of clear, concise titles describing most accurately what’s in store for the reader.  Contrary to print media the optimal titles for your articles on the internet are generally the most boring ones.  Remember, people will be looking for information about or related to your article and your goal is to match most closely what that searcher is looking for.  Going with generic yet accurate titles allows your site to be found in search and better yet, selected amongst the 9 others that surround it on a page.  In addition, using a keyword or key phrase within your title, can dramatically increase its visibility on the internet.  As an example, “content writing” would be a good key phrase to include somewhere in my title for this article. However it’s important to keep in mind that “content writing” is not only a broad key phrase, it happens to also be a very competitive one. The chances of my one little article having visibility in search for the key phrase “content writer” or “content writing” may be very slim.  So by drilling down to a more specific topic within content writing and breaking the competition into smaller sections I benefit in two ways:

1. Lower Competition =Increased Visibility
2. Targeted Content/Audience  =Increased Visibility= Article Conversions

In addition, a more specific title increases its chance of selection from the others surrounding it.  It’s important to remember your own habits of search behavior on the internet.  A common goal amongst searchers is finding the right information in the shortest amount of time.  Lacking specifics in your title may or may not get you more “clicks” but recognition or article popularity doubtful, especially if they realize after clicking on it – it wasn’t the information they were looking for. At this point you would be lucky if they actually read the article. Showing up in search results on the first page is just one part of it, the next and most important part is getting a searcher to click on your results by closely matching what they are searching for.  So here is an example I might use for the title of this article:

Content Writing:  How to Write Articles that Get Read

OR

Content Writing:  How to Increase Your Article Visibility on the Internet