Creating a good information marketing title

Your title, whether it be for an article, a web page, a video, a podcast, or anything else which might show up alongside a variety of similar content, serves two primary purposes:

• Getting search engine traffic
• Getting potential readers to choose your content rather than someone else’s.

Getting Search Engine Traffic

When search engines scan web pages for content, they typically give a lot of weight to the title of the page.

On most sites, your title will be used in the pages title and enclosed in H1 tags on the page itself. Both of these things are used to tell a search engine what the primary content of the page is.

It is for this reason that you should attempt to use the primary keyword that you are targeting as close to the front of your title as you can.

Getting potential readers to choose your article

From a reader perspective, the title of your content is generally what causes them to choose your content over someone else’s.

If you have a weak title, it doesn’t matter how great the body is, few people are likely to select your content when it is displayed next to content with stronger titles.

Strong article titles will typically be reasonably long and do one or more of the following:

• Appeal to a readers emotions
• Address one of the "Seven deadly sins"
• Sound as if they are sharing a secret
• Strongly state that they will solve a perceived problem

If you can create a title which does more than one of these, includes your targeted keyword or phrase early in it, is relevant to your article, and still sounds good, you probably have a title which will perform well.

For example, consider the following two titles:

• Information marketing for online selling
• Stop trying to increase sales by slashing prices and learn a proven method of increasing traffic to your online store immediately

Looking at them next to each other, which one do you think would be more likely to get someone to click on it?

The first tells exactly what is being offered, but is rather mundane and unlikely to catch the eye of anyone when it is listed among other information.

The second, while long, includes multiple strong keywords, speaks directly to online sellers, addresses the common emotional distaste for lowering prices to try and make more sales, addresses the want for more traffic ( strongly associated with more sales ), and promises to provide a solution to the sellers problem (lack of customers and/or sales).

While I, personally, would be more prone to choose the first title because it is simple and plain, most people would choose the second because it is a bit more exciting.