However, a lot of people publishing articles for marketing often approach their article writing, and worse, their title creation, as a pure advertising element–and this can lead to tons of lost readers and exposure for your articles and links.

When you have a marketing mindset, you tend to want to write proven sales copy-like headlines. Those quick-witted, trigger word packed little whoppers that are staples in every decent swipe file and have worked for advertisers for years.

The problem is online publishing is vastly different from print and other traditional medias.

Those whopper sales copy headlines work in print because the reader already has the magazine in their hands, so they can’t miss the quick-witted attention grabbing titles of sales copy.

Online however, you don’t have the magazine or newspaper already in your reader’s hands. The primary way of getting a reader’s eyes onto your article is by having your articles rank well in search engines for targeted keyword terms–and whopper sales copy titles are typically counter-productive to good search engine rankings.

To rank well with search engines, it’s far more beneficial to have a descriptive (of the article content) title that contains your primary keyword term.

Using your article body to get your marketing message across works a lot better when you actually get lots of readers to your article, and smart titles rather than sales copy whoppers works better to attract those readers online.

As proof check out the most viewed articles here at Content Caboodle, look over the titles and see how few look like they might belong in the swipe file of a sales copywriter.

One of the top articles is simply titled “Anteater FAQ” and I can tell you that article gets tons of search engine traffic month after month. In fact, it gets volume search traffic for dozens of different anteater related terms every month.

There’s nothing slippery about that title at all. It’s just perfeclty descriptive of the article’s content and has been rewarded with good search rankings because of it.

There is no secret to creating articles that will rank well with search engines. Just write clearly, provide reliable information and use descriptive titles and sub-headings.

Witty and slippery may seem better, but with online publishing where search engine bots are deciding how much traffic you’re likely to get for your writings, clear and descriptive will always win out.

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