Attracting readers with your entry title and summary

One of the most common questions we at Blog-City get asked, is how do I increase the traffic to my blog? There is no magic answer to this particular question as it relies on so many different things. But there are some simple things that you can do to attract traffic. This entry will look at how a good strong title and a descriptive summary can help.

The first thing you have to remember is that people aren't necessarily visiting your blog out of habit. They have to be attracted there from many different sources on the Internet. At this point, the only tool you have to attract them with is the blog title, and also increasingly a short summary paragraph. Both of these are free from any formatting, and therefore must rely on the content to attract attention.

The title is probably one of the most under-rated pieces of real-estate you have complete control over. The title finds itself everywhere, in search results, aggregator pages, email alerts, RSS feeds, side bars - everywhere! So making sure your title is strong enough to warrant further investigation is key.

• Title Tip#1: Don't make it too long
  Your reader mustn't get bored of reading your title before reaching the end. You need to hold their attention.

• Title Tip#2: Don't make it too short
  Conversely don't make it too short. One or two words for a title generally doesn't tell the reader anything. They have nothing to make a decision on as to whether or not they should click to read it

• Title Tip#3: Try and be different
  With so millions of blog entries being published every day, you sometimes have to fight for attention. Watch how the top-bloggers are titling their entries and apply their thinking to your own writing.

The title to your blog entry is very important for your regular readers also. Let them get to know you and your style of writing. When they read a title, they will soon get to know what to expect, irrespective of how obscure it is. Sometimes that is half the charm; teasing the reader with a hook to lure them into your entry.

The other literay weapon you have in your arsenal, is the blog summary. Some blog tools/providers don't provide for a separate summary and this is very poor, as you are relying on search engines etc to guess a summary by extracting the first few hundred characters of your entry. This can be horrendously misleading. Take control of this area and write your own.

The blog summary is utilised by search engines to give a little bit of feedback to the user as to what the page they have just found in a search is all about. The summary is also used by aggregators as the majority of RSS output utilises only the summary. In addition, the summary is used throughout your own blog as people surf around your blog looking for interesting pieces. It is therefore crucial you take your time and provide a meaningful summary for your entry that will help promote and sell your blog piece.

The summary and title are both used by some of the search engines to rank you in their results. If your title, summary and entry all look related then this will increase your page ranking every so slightly. The rules on how search engines rank pages are always being fine tuned and there isn't one magic bullet in this respect, but you can help yourself, by make sure they all make sense, and you aren't deceiving your audience with false promises.

It generally only takes one good entry for a reader to make a decision on whether or not they wish to return to your blog, or even better, sign-up to your mailing list to be alerted of future publications.

Don't let the title and summary go to waste, they are your only hook to get the outside world into your blog.

tags: blog help  traffic  writing