Choosing headline ideas for your sales copy, blog posts and article titles can be difficult if you make it that way. But, the truth is, headline ideas are as simple as following the following three tips:
1. Use Keywords — Using keywords in your headline ideas help search engines find your content, but there is more to it than that, you should also include your keyword within the first paragraph of your content, then pepper it throughout the rest of the content while still keeping the content informative and readable for humans.
Example: If you are blogging about the importance of getting your teeth cleaned, a great headline would be: The Importance of proper tooth cleaning. If you do keyword research (and you should be) you can find out what keywords your target audience are using and create a headline based on those words.
2. Use superlatives — These are words such as “The Most”, “The Best”; words, according to Wikipedia, that make your adjective or adverb their greatest form. Also, according to dictionary.com, an adjective is a descriptive word that describes a noun or pronoun, and an adverb answer questions such as how, in what way, when, where and to what extent. The adverb essentially adds descriptive information to the verb. By using superlatives, you’re drawing attention to your headline idea by humans and not just search engines. By claiming something to be the “most complete” or the “most useful” or the fastest ” you’re making it a superlative, which is super awesome for a headline idea.
Example: If you are writing a sales page about a course on how to use WordPress to build your website a good title using superlatives would be: The fastest & easiest way to build the best membership site using WordPress.
3. Give Directions — Most people look up the words “how to” do something with the search engine. Therefore, it goes to reason that you should make your headline ideas conform with the fact that most people want to know “how to” do something. This is the easiest headline idea that you’ve probably seen a lot of on the net. Therefore make sure your “how to ____” fill in the blank is something people really have searched for otherwise you’ll get lost in all the other how to’s.
Example: Suppose you’re writing an article about How to work from home, but you’re specifically targeting people who want to work from home as a web designer or graphic designer. Instead of titling your article simply “how to work from home” you should be very specific: How to work from home as a graphic designer.
To help you with your headline ideas, the best thing that you can do is write your content based off your keyword research results and then choose a headline based on the content of the article, blog post, or sales page as well as your keyword research. Remember that without humans to read what you have written it won’t matter how much traffic the search engines send, so make sure your content is readable.
Bonus: The very best headline idea combines all three of these suggestions. Use superlatives, directional language and keywords in your headline and you’ll have a winning headline idea that attracts both the search engines and the humans. Look at the title of the content you’re currently reading for a great example.
