Most authors waste time producing tens to hundreds of high-quality articles that never reach a fraction of their traffic potential. It’s a shame.

When I review the behind-the-scenes traffic statistics for millions of articles that have produced millions of monthly page views in my article content lab … ONE thing is clear: not all articles are created equal, even when everything in them is identical except for the TITLE.

The reason is probably not what you think.

If you’ve been trained in traditional copywriting, you know that in the real world, the title determines up to 95% of the success of the book or article. This statistic takes into consideration what makes the book title successful: whether or not a human buys it.

Article writing on the internet is a completely different story because of the way your articles reach the people who have an interest in them.

MYTH: Most people will read your articles because they came to a website and started browsing like they do if they go to a local bookstore to find a book of personal interest.

DONE: Wrong! Most people will search the Internet using one of the major search engines and will put in between 1 and 5 keywords related to the topic of the article or the information they are looking to locate. Search engines will provide the results that best suit the interest of the human being.

YOUR GOAL: To get your articles to appear in search engine results for the keywords and topics that are most related to the content of your article.

AS?

You must accept this TITLE building and traffic building truth:

The first 3-5 words of your TITLE determine the success of your article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate to your website. Success can only be achieved when you create keyword-rich titles for your articles that match the most commonly searched keywords for your topic.

How do you determine which keywords are rich and the right ones to use in your article?

You will need a keyword research tool. Some are free and some are paid. Overture.com has a popular keyword research tool that shows you the most common search results from the Yahoo search engine directory. If you want to see what’s in “Google Mind”, you can try one of their current beta tools called “Google Tip”:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=1

Whether you’re using a web-based keyword research tool or investing in one of the most advanced application-level software keyword research tools, it’s critical that you learn how to conduct keyword research.

A “good” vs. Example of TITLE “bad”:

Here’s an example of the difference between a rich TITLE without keywords and a very keyword-rich TITLE that has been shown to perform better in terms of creating traffic:

Example of wrong TITLE:

“Top 9 ways you can acquire fractional ownership of a jet”

Excellent example of a keyword-rich title:

Fractional Jet Ownership: 9 Strategies to Help You Get Your Private Jet

Why is it more effective?

Because it doesn’t waste the first 3 words of the title with nonsense junk words like “top” or the number “9” or “way” … and it goes straight to the important words that can be found when someone is using a search. engine to research a topic related to your article.

You will also notice in my example that I included the word Jet “Private”. Why? Because my keyword research said that fractional jet searchers also search for the word “private jet” and therefore I wanted to increase the chances that my title would be found by more potential article visitors.

Two recommendations on what NOT to do:

1) Do not include junk characters in your TITLE, such as quotes, accents, asterisks, or anything else that search engines have to struggle to rule out in order to understand the TITLE of your article.

2) Don’t get involved in any search engine spamming techniques by having keyword-rich TITLES that have nothing to do with the subject of your article. You’ll only hurt yourself because search engines already aggressively filter out bad behavior like this.

YOUR INTELLIGENT KEYWORD-RICH TITLE COPYWRITING CONCLUSION:

If you want to maximize the results of any article writing strategy, you must master keyword research in order to create smart, keyword-rich article TITLES. Your reward will be a lot of traffic to your articles and website thanks to search engines that love TITLES rich with smart keywords!