Just like a first impression, a post title is the most important part of the entire article. Writing clickable headlines and catchy post titles makes sure your article goes viral.
A reader decides whether to read your article or ignore it just by reading the post title.
To improve social shares of your blog, you can’t help but writing eye catching titles for articles.
Keyword stuffing is a popular practice to write article titles to get listed on search engines. But such titles are not catchy at all.
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An eye-catching title should have only the essential keywords as well as those words that will strike a chord in the reader’s mind.
Instead of practicing keyword stuffing in your article titles where you try to put all the keywords in the article titles, you should focus on writing SEO header tags.
The practice of SEO header tags requires you to spread your keywords evenly in your article sub-headings where you use H1 to H6 header tags.
Today, I will explain how to write clickable headlines such that readers will be forced to click and open your articles.
(Image Source – Coschedule)
Why A Good Blog Post Title Is Not Good Enough?
Most of the bloggers concentrate on the quality of the articles and pay minimum attention to the other important aspects.
Article titles and featured images should get equal priority as the quality of the article.
First, you have to make sure that the readers actually open your article to read and then the fact that they should read something great.
The key to open the door to your article is the article title.
Sub-headings also play an important role to make sure that the reader reads the entire article.
“According to Buffer, 80% of the audiences open an article just by reading the article headline or title. Only 20% check the description and other stuff.”
Featured image of a post is also important to grab the eyeballs and force the audience to open the article by instigating their curiosity.
Gone are the days when a good and simple title with keyword stuffing could do the job. These days, only eye-catching titles make an article viral because titles form the first impression when the article links are posted on social media.
Social media channels are the sources of maximum traffic for most of the viral blogs. To get more social shares, you have to play with the sentiments and not with keywords that much.
(Infographic Courtesy – CopyPress)
How To Write Clickable Headlines and Effective Post Titles?
The headlines of articles sell it in public. For example, the title of our article is ‘How to Write Clickable Headlines That Make Articles Viral’ which serves two purposes.
The article will get listed for search engine queries:
‘How to write clickable headlines’ as well as ‘How to make articles viral’
It is a perfect example of covering the vital keywords as well as instigating people to click on the article link because a reader thinks it talks about the secrets of making an article viral.
#1 Keywords and Eye-Catching Words
First thing you need to do is to list the important keywords that will help to get you a rank on search engine result pages. Then make a list of eye-catching words that goes well with the subject of the articles.
For our article title, we listed ‘viral’, ‘unlimited traffic’, ‘catchy’, ‘share’ and likewise to toy with public sentiment. But our keywords were ‘article’, ‘headlines’, ‘articles’ and ‘viral’. Once you have the list of both categories of words, you can start to form titles.
#2 Keyword Research Work
To list the right keywords for your articles and find the best attention-grabbing words, you have to do a short research work.
You already know how to find the best keywords using various tools like Google keyword planner and its alternatives.
To find noticeable words, you need to keep an eye on your competitors and search engines.
You need to find out the intriguing words and blog titles used by your competitors or even the established players in your niche.
Once you get a list of words from their viral blog titles, you can improvise and use them in yours. It is most probably going to work as the targeted audience in your niche already like those words.
You can also use the keywords you have listed to search on search engines and read the different blog titles that come up on SERPs.
#3 Sentence Formations
Once you have the words, you have to use those to form a catchy sentence. It can be something that answers a common question and it will also help to get high rank on SERPs. For example:-
How to write a post title to make an article viral?
How to write WordPress post title to get unlimited traffic? And so on.
It can be something that provides a solution like:-
This is how titles of blogs get unlimited social share.
This is what makes blog posts and articles viral.
While forming a sentence, it is essential to include important keywords and make the line sensational.
#4 Planning
Sentence formation of clickable headlines require a little bit of planning as well. You have to answer a few questions to get an automatic idea of how the sentence should be.
The first question is why the targeted audience should read the article and the second question is what they can do after reading the article.
Once you have the answers, you should know that your article headlines must reflect the answers.
Form as many sentences as you can and select the one that sounds the most promising and scores high on the analyzer tools listed below.
#5 Blog Article Headlines Generator
There are so many tools available on the internet that will help in forming viral blog titles without any hard work.
Some of the popular online tools are –
Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator – where you have to supply keywords and catchy words and they will provide you five different blog titles ideas.
Portent’s Content Idea Generator – where you have to enter the subject of your article and they will generate relevant titles.
You have to click on the refresh button provided to get new ideas one by one. It also provides ideas for what to write about.
Blog Title Generator by SEOPressor – Here you have to provide the keywords and from a dropdown list, you have to select the best alternative that describes your keyword.
#6 Blog Headlines Analyzer
There are also a few handy tools available for free that can analyze the strength of your blog title and point out the weakness.
The best among them is Hemingway Share Through. It provides a score from 1-100 and lists the strengths, suggestions for improvement and other important inputs.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is another such popular tool.
“According to Kissmetrics, the first two words and last word of the blog title must contain the most impactful words. The reason is that the first part should strike the chord in the reader’s mind and the last word must force the reader to click on the link. Try to optimize post titles and keep them within 10 words.”
(Image Source – Blog.Hubspot)
#7 Examples of Catchy Blog Titles
The most common types of catchy blog titles are listed below. They will guide you to write a good title for a blog post but to write great blog post headlines, you have to follow the above-mentioned steps and do some brainstorming.
Question Tags – ‘How To’ are the best words to use to write an article and people search with those two words on search engines.
Example 1 – How to make a post viral?
Example 2 – How can you get unlimited traffic for your blog?
‘How’ is the most common word used in blog headlines.
Top – List – ‘Top’ is a very common word to begin your blog title.
‘Top’ is commonly accompanied by a number among which ‘10’ is very popular.
Example – Top 10 Ways to Make Your Post Viral
But it is not always good to follow the same thing again and again. Hence you should replace the number with impactful words.
Example – Top Verified Templates for Your WordPress Blog
Breaking – News Type – This type of article headlines generally sounds more like click-baits but you should definitely try them out to check which category of titles suits your targeted audiences.
Example – Shocking Secrets of Making a Post Viral Finally Revealed
Top Tips and Tricks – ‘Tips’, ‘Tricks’, ‘Ways’, ‘Secrets’ and ‘Hacks’ are very much used these days to attract attention and they are good from SEO point of view as well. They are accompanied by ‘Top-List’ type words.
Example – Top 10 Hacks to Make Your Blog Viral
Super Catchy – If you can put a number to your blog title, it will increase the credibility of the title far more than usual ones.
Example 1 – How to Increase Your Blog Traffic by 200%
Example 2 – How to Make Your Post Viral in 3 Hours
To Summarize
Lastly, the key to success is creativity and testing.
It is not necessary that if a particular type is working for the established players in your niche, it would also click for you.
Try with different titles and headlines and see which one is working the best. This is what is called A/B testing.
You must also upgrade the title names of the old posts from time to time so that you can post them on social media channels and the targeted audiences will think that it is a new article and they will give a read.
Try to make titles sound astounding and surprising and not common.
Go ahead and begin your experiment.
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Article by Gaurav Jain
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My name is Gaurav Jain, a full time affiliate marketer since 2007.
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