Who Are You Writing Your Headlines For?

Muhammad Saleem has put together a great post at CopyBlogger that offers up some helpful advice on how to write your titles to appeal to search engines, social media users and to your current readers. While he admits that it's difficult to properly appeal to all three audiences at the same time, he offers up some great advice on why you might target a particular post at any one group and even throws in a few before and after titles as examples of his suggestions in action.

Muhammad goes on to point out that while you clearly have a little bit of leeway with regular readers, (after all, they're already at your site, there's little convincing needed to get them to read your post) you'll need to put some thought into your titles if you want them to rank well on search engines or serve as "Diggbait."

He offers up specific tips for reaching each of the three categories of readers. Take this section from his social media section:

It's a great example of how a very slight title edit can make a world of difference.

In fact, simply taking a half an hour and reading the various titles of listings on Digg and then clicking through to see what the original title is can serve as a powerful lesson in how to write attention grabbing headlines.