Description: Does your content get the right attention and do people find it attractive enough to share it or all your hard-work seems to be in vain because your content isn’t coming up on the search engines. It is because you haven’t used the right headline!
It is obvious that anyone floating content online would love to have their work shared, looked up and gain popularity. But are you aware that something written randomly will not get your work the right attention. A great headline is not only bound to be found in the search engines but also makes your content shareable. Power words for headlines are what you need, but what are these powerful words? Read on to discover the art of writing a perfect headline so your content is always the centre of attraction.
- Begin With a Number and Make a List
Why? Because people love to scan and not read the full content most of the times. People are curious to know about something before they open it and in this course save their data. Numbers are precise and one knows how much and what to expect. Anything that has been listed makes it look more neat, wieldy and esculent.
Studies clearly show that listing articles outdo other types of content formats. They stand out of the crowd and are one of the best ways to impress the readers and make it shareable.
- The Shorter They are the Better They Sound
Besides sounding crisp, short headlines work wonderfully for social media, the readers and Search Engine Optimization. The search engines condense longer headlines, as a result an incomplete headline is displayed. Headlines that comprise of characters ranging from 60 to 70 are perfect and fit well in the search results. If you don’t have a choice and your headline seems to be a bit long because you are making it keyword enriched, then ensure that the keyword is adjusted in the first part of the headline.
Famous social media platforms allow limited characters to be shared. For instance Twitter allows 140 characters only, this is including the URL. We already know about the habit of people scanning the article instead of reading it; short headlines help in scanning faster.
- Make it Intriguing; Keep Up the Mystery
Let your headlines be questions; questions tend to create curiosity which enables the reader to continue reading the content. However even though they set the base for a good headline it is important that you hint the reader about what they are going to get in the content yet don’t actually giving the content away and enticing your readers to finish reading the article or targeted content.
- Arrangement of the Power Words For Headlines
Common words are the usual words that are used to form a sentence. They bind the headline together and make it readable. They are the framework of your headlines and should make up around 20 to 30% words of the headlines.
An average of atleast 10 to 20% of the uncommon words in the headlines is enough to get your readers attention. Uncommon words are distinctive and they also provide your headline with substance. A few examples of uncommon words could be awesome, actually, social etc.
The role of emotional words is to lure your readers to read the complete article. The readers have been found to share posts with emotional words more in comparison to the ones without them. 10 to 15% of a headline should comprise of emotional words. Words such as valuable, zinger, blissful etc. are some examples.
The most important part is the power words. Power words for headlines are normally phrases that are known to provoke action. Power words stimulate an emotion or call to action without much perspective. Power words are rarely used words but they guarantee clicks. A good headline will have atleast one power word. Power words or power phrases could be – you need to know, what this, in the world etc.
- Mention Reader Intensive Keywords and Use Power Words for Headlines
You need to know your target audience to put reader focused words in your headlines. The place, country, nature of targeted audience will depend on how they react to your headlines. Specific audience will respond in a specific way to the tone they are spoken in and it is your duty to make it appealing for them if you want your content to be read. SEO keywords should also be included because keywords are actually what people are looking for. These power words for headlines will help your content to come up in search results too.
- Make Your Headlines Sound Positive
Research shows positive statements have a strong impact and perform better than the negative statements. According to Dr.HakimChisti, emotional language tends to build an expectable response. There are times when extremes perform well; in situations if your headline is extremely positive or extremely negative, will get more traction than the normal ones.
Strongly positive emotions have the tendency of being shared more, you could drift to negative also but there are fewer chances of you hitting the hammer on the exact spot with negative headlines.
- Punctuation Marks are Important
This is something very simple but you will be surprised besides using power words for headlines to enhance your readability how much impact a simple punctuation mark could have on your content. According to an Outbrain study it was found that adding a semi-colon, hyphen or colon to the headlines pushed the rate of click through by 9%.
There is no special techniques required just try and place your keyword ahead of the hyphen or colon and then complete your headline.
The above tips are definitely going to help increase your traffic and impact your search results. Besides inculcating these tips you could also make use of a free tool ‘Headline Analyzer’ which could help you see where your headlines stand. You could make the required changes according to its results.