02 February 2009

Improve Headlines Effectiveness Using Free Optimizer Tool

You have interesting genuine content, but if your title is not attractive enough, bypassing readers might not stop to read it. You have to capture, you have to catch, and you have to surprise. There is free online assistant that might help you to generate titles, attractive enough both for readers and search engines.




What is it?
Headline Analyzer evaluates the headline which you have written on your site or decided to write and tells you how efficient it is. You can use the tool and write many headlines and choose the best one. The tool will give you a result in percentage. What the system says is that normally gifted freelance writers have the ability to create headlines of 50%-70%.

How Does It Work?
They have done pretty good research and finally put up a system. The system will check for the emotional, emphatic, and eye-catchy words and then give you a result based on it. You can check on how it works here.

How to Improve?
This is easy to answer. All you have to do is, try typing different headlines and see which one gives the best score and use it. While you may not get above 80% at your first try, you can get above 50% with little hard.

Few Defects
Most of the things you use in life have its own advantages and disadvantages. Like that, this tool has few defects too. Try typing the following things and see the result:

I Love Google - 0%
Probably - 400%

Though the second one is not a headline, it is not something which can constitute a headline. Likewise, I Love Google can be a headline and in fact and eye-catchy headline but it gives 0%.




Evaluation

I decided to evaluate the tool by working on the headline to the post you are reading now.

The first title I tried was a simple and informational one: "Using Headlines Optimizer Service". The service did not like the title much and gave pretty low score of 25%. Adding the magic word Free without changing anything else "Using Free Headlines Optimizer Service" improved the rating, raising it to 40%, which is considered solid average score. Changing a word Service to word Tool as "Using Free Headlines Optimizer Tool" significantly improved the score, brining it to professional level of 60%. The result is pretty good already, but it definitely can be improved. The question is of how much time you can allow yourself working on every post title.

Making the post concept stronger with title "Improve Headlines Effectiveness Using Free Optimizer Tool" brings the score 71.43%. At this moment I will stop and let you play with this free simple and useful service.




Where to Start
Before trying the optimizer, you need to understand basics on how to make the post title attractive. Here, you can review the model developed by RealEstateTomato. There are titles offered as good and bad examples. I will use each title to check the score, so we can verify that author’s improvement advices aligned with automatic tool recommendations.

1. Emotion - Make your audience feel something they can relate to. Emotion can be brought out in several ways:

- Extreme words: best, most, never, crucial, perfect
- Emotional words: scary, sad, mean, fun
- Playful words: secret, hidden, unknown, forgotten, exciting…
- Curiosities: celebrities, well known people, news items, buzz words…
- Use something attention grabbing.
Bad Title: Interest Rates Are Unpredictable (25%).
Good Title: The 4 Crucial Reasons You Don’t Want To Wait On Interest Rates (50%).


2. Call To Action - What am I going to take away from this article? Don’t hide it in the body.

- Improve on something.
- Teach something.
- Overcome something.
- Uncover something.
- Just offer something.
Bad Title: The Real Estate Loan Broken Down (16.67%).
Good Title: 5 Simple Solutions to Getting Organized For a Real Estate Loan (27.27%).

3. Description - Lay it all out there.

- Tell the whole story in a sentence.
- Avoid confusion with description.
- Avoid assumptions; your audience shouldn’t have to guess what your writing about.
Bad Title: The Real Estate Transaction Is Not That Difficult (25%).
Good Title: Exactly Why The Real Estate Transaction Process Is Easier Than Getting A Tattoo (38.46%).

4. Keywords - Make sure you are being found for terms that match your focus.

- Work your focus into your titles
- The Title is the most weighted element in your articles search engine success
- Search engines aren’t going to give you credit for keywords, unless you include them.
Bad Title: Friends Don’t Let Friends Pay 6% (0%).
Good Title: Friends Don’t Let Friends Pay 6% In Real Estate Commissions (10%).

Make your headlines look like headlines that are important, but not obnoxious. Avoid using all CAPS and avoid writing in lower case. That can be considered as lack of respect to your readers.

As you see, a Good Title score is always higher than a Bad Title, even though the “good and bad” consideration differs every time.

Webpage: http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm
More recommendations on the Blog Title generation:
http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2008/09/need-killing-blog-title-template.html



1 comment:

  1. Thanks for your submission to the Thirty-Sixth edition of the Blog Carnival: Blogging. Your post has been accepted and its live: http://thatsblog.com/?p=222

    -ThatsBlog.com

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