Make Your Pages Irresistible – The Power of Provocative Titles

When you run a website you have lots of goals and these will vary from webmaster to webmaster. Maybe your sole intention is to promote your business, or maybe it’s to get clicks on adverts. Then again maybe it’s just to get the word out there and to share your interests. Whatever your purpose though, one thing is crucial to achieve any of it – and that’s traffic.
In short you need to bring people to your site, and then you need to hold their attention for long enough to keep them there so that you can send them your message or tempt them with a product or service. The question is – how do you do that?
There are lots of ways of course, but one that’s particularly effective is to use controversial and provocative titles, and that’s what we’ll be looking at here…

Adding Details to Titles

So let’s say that you have an article on how to lose weight. If you were to call it ‘How to Lose Weight’ then you would have done nothing to help it get read because it wouldn’t stand out in any way from the hundreds of other articles out there. You need to think of the people who will be seeing your article, and about what is more likely to grab their attention.
One tip right away then is to be more specific and unique. To achieve this you should simply summarize what’s in your article, or pick out and describe a key interesting point or even your conclusion – and don’t worry if the title is quite long. So for instance you can have ‘How to Lose Weight in 12 Steps’ or ‘How to Lose Weight by Having Less Sugar in Your Tea’ or ‘How to Lose Weight by Eating More Fiber’. Immediately then your title stands out more and is more descriptive and it tells the person whether they might be interested.
Secondly, don’t be afraid to exaggerate or mislead in your title. So if your article was on losing weight by eating fiber, then you could make the title something like ‘Lose Weight by Eating More‘. Or ‘One Magic Food to Help You Shed Pounds’. This instantly grabs attention and again makes sure that your article stands out from the crowd. You can also ask questions in your title (that will be answered in the article) which is a great way to get the reader interacting and thinking.

We Need a Little Controversy

The other way to make your articles really grab attention is to make them controversial. Making short sharp sentences for your titles is a punchy way to get someone curious, and if these statements are controversial, or seem unbelievable then that’s even better.
Again this title can be misleading and the statement you use for the title doesn’t have to concur with the conclusion of your article. For instance then if you were to write an article on how to lose weight, you could put a very controversial spin on that by stating ‘No Excuses for Fat People’, or ‘Why it’s Your Own Fault You’re Overweight’. In the article you would then point out that of course there are many more factors and in fact that people are often overweight for reasons outside of their control – but by using the controversial statement you get people to read.
Even if the reason those people read is because they are angry or because they don’t believe what you’ve written is true – they’re still reading and that’s all you need to put your real message across. Any emotional response, and anything that gets them to stop in their tracks, will be far more likely to be read when they stumble across your site or see a link on a social networking site.

Jeet loves to write posts on SEO link building, blogging and if often found lurking on various webmaster forums interacting with members.