Headlines and first paragraphs - they’re not just for Search Engines.

Posted by stuart as ,

As bloggers, most of us have two main aims: traffic, and money. You can’t have the money without the traffic. (Although it’s certainly possible to have the traffic without the money, just ask me!)

Up until the last year or so, there were pretty much two ways to get traffic: regular visitors who like what you’ve written in the past, and search engines, which send people to your blog based on certain search terms.

In the past, we’d stuff our headlines and first paragraphs with our chosen keywords, in the hope that they’d rank well in the search engines, but now, we’re playing a whole new ball game to try to reach our intended audience.

In this web 2.0 world, all full of RSS feed readers, social bookmarking sites, and blog aggregators, we bloggers are presented with a wonderful new opportunity to put our content in front of potential readers. But we need to think about these readers in a completely new way.

The one thing that RSS readers, social bookmarking sites (digg, reddit etc) and blog aggregators (technorati etc) have in common is that you have a very short period of time to catch the readers attention. In most cases you get a headline, and the first paragraph to convince the potential visitor that your site is worth visiting.

So instead of stuffing our headline and first paragraph with our chosen keywords, we need to make those parts of our post as impactful and enticing as possible.

Striking the balance between getting our hands on these new readers, and making our posts relevant to the search engines in the longer term can be quite difficult, but with some practice and hard work, can be acheived.