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How Do You Title Your Ezine Articles?

by James Liberty
9 replies
There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to writing titles for Ezine Articles:
  1. Do keyword research and include them in your article's title
  2. Ignore keywords and write an interesting title that draws attention
Further complicating things is the fact that I've received conflicting information from the website itself. (They posted an article about the importance of doing keyword research before writing an article title, then recently posted on this forum that "it's still our goal to be your highest non-search engine referrer of traffic").

So... which is it? Any insight would be much appreciated.
#articles #ezine #title
  • Profile picture of the author VanceQMead
    Hi James-

    Interestingly, I just posted my first article with EzineArticles a few days ago. During the sign up process, I read, from them, that it's very imortant to make your keywords the first few words in the title of your article.

    Whether it helps or not, I don't know, because I got listed on the first page of google for that keyword phrase (same article) on a different directory, but haven't seen it yet on google from EzineArticles.com yet.

    I'm also interested in others findings on this.

    Vance
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  • Profile picture of the author VanceQMead
    Hahaha... Wouldn't you know it...

    After I posted, I searched for my keyword phrase again (last time I searched it was yesterday) and now my ezinearticles.com article is showing up on page 2 of google. The other directory article is now disappeared, tho... interesting!
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  • Profile picture of the author venomous2000
    I include keywords, it actaully helps and has a higher page rank.
    Signature

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  • Profile picture of the author Bryan Zimmerman
    Originally Posted by James Legacy View Post

    There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to writing titles for Ezine Articles:
    1. Do keyword research and include them in your article's title
    2. Ignore keywords and write an interesting title that draws attention
    Just do both and then you don't have to worry about either one. If you have an article on dog training and your keyword is "puppy potty training" then just throw up a title like

    Puppy Potty Training - Stop Your Puppy From Using Your Chair For A Toilet Before You Kill It!

    Not the kindest title for the puppy, but it will get opened
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  • Profile picture of the author Asher
    As stated before, use both.

    But for the few articles that I've submitted, I did both...
    submitted with SEO keyword optimized titles and those
    without it.

    My results are as follows....

    Doing keyword research
    ==================
    May not get a lot of clickthroughs from the people
    browsing the articles but over a period of time, it
    grows steadily if it targets a keyword that people
    are looking for without a lot of competition.

    No keyword research/just great title
    ===========================
    I get a lot of views for that article and quite a lot
    of clickthroughs. But when the article falls into the
    backlogs, the views do not increase at all. Even
    after a couple of months.

    So... yeah, I think it's best to use both!

    Asher
    Signature
    Asher Aw
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  • Profile picture of the author JonesersRX7
    Always use the keyword(s) and also use Google's external keyword for research and include one or 2 related keywords for LSI in the title as well as body.
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  • Profile picture of the author gpsterra
    Well, I've submitted hundreds of articles over time. I used to do kwd research, but now it only slows me down. Here's why I don't do it:

    One of my articles got 23,964 views since December. More than 200 times as many views as the others in the same category? What was different? The title. You can check the article out here:

    ezinearticles.com/?A-Shockingly-Easy-Way-to-Stop-a-Dog-From-Barking&id=1755895]A Shockingly Easy Way to Stop a Dog From Barking

    (I actually thought it was funny, in retrospect... a SHOCKINGLY easy way... I swear it wasn't on purpose)

    Anyway, you know what kind of search terms were driving the most views?

    dog 12
    easiest way to kill a dog 6
    how to get your dog to stop barking 4
    how to stop adog from barking 3
    easy way to an a 3
    stop a dog from barking 3
    how to get a dog to stop barking 2
    best way to stop barking 2
    why doggies should get their way 2
    how do you get a dog to stop barking at everything 2
    stop barking dog 2
    best method to stop barking 2

    That was January. You know what it is now?

    dogs in heat 33
    dog in heat 12
    how long are dogs in heat 10
    dog constipation 6
    how long is a dog in heat 5
    female dog in heat 5
    dogs in heat how long 4


    WHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTT????????

    I didn't even mention dogs in heat.

    And seriously, how can you optimize for "dog"?

    So what does that tell us:

    1) Even if you think you're optimizing for a keyword, Google chooses whatever they think is best, and it's usually not what you think.

    2) We're talking about maybe 150 views compared to 23964. There are much bigger things at work here that make an article view count explode.

    3) Even though, at this time, I have over 90 articles just under that pen name, that article accounts for over 60% of my views. Another article accounts for 15%... meaning 5% of my articles account for 75% of my views/traffic.

    4) Your time is better spent writing and submitting a new article than fretting over the title. Just try to make it catchy... something will eventually stick and you'll get the hang of it.

    Hope this helps.
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