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There’s a thin line between appropriately using your keywords in your titles and being obnoxious about it. You may look at some titles and think,

“That title barely makes sense,” or “All this person’s titles look the same, and they don’t really give me any idea of what their article is about.”

If someone is looking at your title and saying either of those two things, you haven’t used keywords appropriately.

If you’re wondering how to effectively incorporate your keywords into your article titles–look no further! This article will show you 7 keyword integrating title tips that’ll help you catch Google’s eye (and your reader’s too!):

1) Your title should reflect what the article is about.

That tip may sound obvious, but folks who are super-focused on inserting their keywords into their titles sometimes end up with titles that don’t reflect specifically what their article is about. First and foremost, remember that the purpose of your title is to lure a reader in with a taste of what the article is about.

2) Your title should be attention-grabbing and stand out from all the other articles on the same topic.

When a reader is looking at an article directory or search results on Google, they will be looking at a list of titles all on the same topic. In order to get the click-through, your title needs to stand apart from the pack and make the reader say,

“That article looks like it would answer my question in an interesting way!”

There is little benefit to having your keywords in your article title if your title is BO-RING!

Your article won’t be the only article on the article directory it’s published on, and it will not be the only search result on Google. Your title is competing against tons of other titles, so be compelling, have a hook, grab your reader’s attention and lure them into your article.

3) Don’t force your keywords to be in your title if you cannot meet the first two criteria here.

Yes–these first two criteria are more important than getting your keywords in your title. Above all, craft an attention-grabbing title that tells specifically what your article is about.

4) Don’t stuff your keywords.

There are some folks who are not really interested in writing an educational article–they just see the article as a vehicle for their keywords, and they create a makeshift article and insert their keywords throughout it.

Don’t do that!

That is not what article marketing is about, and you will totally miss out on the wonderful benefits you can achieve if you overlook the main purpose of your article–to educate the reader.

Put yourself in the shoes of your reader–from looking at your article title amid a sea of other article titles on the same topic, would your title draw a reader in and cause them to click through to the rest of your article?

5) Consider making your title the remedy that your article offers.

We need to sort of twist our thinking–when someone is doing a Google search, they are most often looking for the solution to a problem.

Think like your target market–if they were to find your article, what would they be typing into Google to reach it?

This could mean having a title that is a question. For example: “Can I bake my own wedding cake?” or “How can I stop my dog from jumping on people?”.

6) Keep it natural.

Lots of times folks establish keywords, and they think they need to use those exact keywords in their article title and in their article, with a result that sounds contrived and forced.

Keep in mind that Google will acknowledge variations of your keywords too. For example, if your keyword is “sail boats”, you can also use “sailing boats”, “sail boat” or “how to sail a boat”–any words that are semantically related to the original keywords.

7) If you write on the topic of your website (which you should definitely be doing!), there is a good chance that your keywords will naturally appear in your article without even trying.

We’re going for a natural sounding article that serves our readers, and the truth is that as long as you’re writing about the topic of your website, your keywords and their variations will likely appear in the article naturally.

The big lesson here–don’t over-think the keyword issue. Yes, you can mention your keywords in your article titles, but only IF your article title also indicates what your article is about and is compelling enough to catch a reader’s attention.

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Sharon is an article marketing expert who loves to teach folks how to drive traffic to their websites. Now you know how to use keywords in your articles–would you like to submit articles to a very large distribution network of quality publishers who really want to receive your articles? Of course you would! Learn how to leverage your articles so that you get maximum results and reach hundreds of publishers with the click of a button.

Tags: article titles, keywords, Writing

Is duplicate content penalty a myth or a reality?  Well I would say that it’s a bit of both.  Many folk have been terrorised into paranoia over duplicate content, but here are the facts.

“Duplicate content is bad.”

Okay, so I said it.  But please note that I didn’t say that it’s evil or that your web pages are certainly heading to supplemental hell.  But duplicate content can be bad for the following reasons.

1. Multiple copies of the same content are not useful to the internet as a whole
2. Multiple copies of the same content on your website could dilute your “link juice”
3. Multiple copies of the same content can hamper effective indexing of your website.
4. Multiple copies of the same content will confuse the search engines as to which copy may be the original.

Multiple copies are not useful to the internet.  Okay so we often turn on the TV only to find that while there are over 100 channels on offer there’s still nothing on.  But imagine if out of the 100 channels there were only really 8 to choose from, the others were simply showing the same thing as on the others.  Duplicate content works in the same way.  It serves us the same content on all the channels.  The search engines quickly realised that good content ranks but that the same content shouldn’t fill all choices.  This is the real penalty of duplicate content.  The same content shouldn’t rank over and over because if it doesn’t meet the searcher’s needs then they wouldn’t have another option.

From the average webmaster’s point of view I would say that point 2 is the most important.  Can you imagine having 3 or 4 pages all with great content, but the same content, being indexed and linked to from related websites?  Sounds great, but if it is the same content then you have effectively shared the full linking power of that content over multiple pages.  So in this case instead of having one page showing up on the first page of the search results, you now have 2 on the second.  I know which scenario I would prefer.  The other side of the coin is with dynamic URLs you may find that several different dynamic formulas may take you to the same product page.  Again this could be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and with this may come the uncertainty as to which one to rank.  Quite often this will result in the relegation of both of those URLs to a lower rank.  Although I have a sneaky suspicion that the search engines are catching onto the dynamic URL problem and now will rank one page from a website and simply ignore the others.

Should you have multiple versions of the same content on your website as can often be the case of dynamic URLs then this may prevent the search engines from indexing your whole website.  Imagine once again you are searching through the TV channels and the first 10 are all the same, you may continue searching and reach channel 20.  If by this time you’re still searching then you must be really bored.  The Bots don’t have time to get bored, if it reaches page 10 and all the content seems the same it will assume that the rest aren’t worth indexing.  This could be a problem.  Added to this if it deems none of your pages worth indexing you could face a massive uphill battle to have your pages indexed, never mind ranking highly.

Originality is a difficult one because with no way of being able to certify that you were the first to post the content the search engines rely on the speed with which it was indexed.  Indexing of websites takes place at different rates.  Blogs generally are crawled and indexed a lot more frequently than a website that shows updates once a month on average.  In this case if you had added great quality content to your website only to have a blogger scrape it, you might lose the full benefit of this content as the blog may be indexed and be recognised as having first published it.  While this is an extreme example it is a good reason to regularly update your website to keep the search bots coming back regularly.

As you can see from the points above there is no definite penalty for duplicate content.  But for reasons that make good logical sense many times these pages simply don’t cut it at the highest level.  The question you should always be asking is, “will this benefit my visitors?” or even, “Will this impact negatively on my visitors?”  The answer to that question should quickly send you in the right direction and keep you from possible pitfalls.

Robert Cerff is a search engine analyst and marketing consultant for Prop Data Internet Solutions. He has ten years experience in e-commerce, online marketing and web development. http://www.propdata.co.za

Tags: duplicate content, Writing

The Web has gradually transformed itself from a haven for socially dysfunctional misanthropes and programming savants into a grand social and business networking environment. The popularity of MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin and all their various clones serves as evidence that people want to connect to other people. The fact that the Web is a cold, remote, isolated world oddly enhances, and actually encourages the building of relationships.

For those businesses that really don’t know how to effectively use the Web, or those that are interested in actually using their websites for more than a digital brochure, the answer is clear: your website’s most important marketing objective is to connect with a relevant audience and build a productive relationship.

Just Because It’s Trendy, Doesn’t Make It Productive

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Tags: branded website host, Website Promotion