How to Attract and Retain Social Media and Search Engine Traffic
By Terry Heath · Print This Article
You have about three seconds to grab my attention, or I’m gone. When I follow a link from search engines or any of the social media sites I visit, I want something good and I want it fast. If you can’t tell me up front why I should stick around, I won’t.
Okay, so you’ve thought about optimizing your content for search engines, but do you really believe it isn’t necessary to optimize your website for social media traffic as well? Many bloggers and webmasters say traffic from StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, and others, is useless; they say those visitors won’t stick around and won’t subscribe to your RSS feed. If you’ve followed the rapid growth of SEONoobs you’ll know those bloggers and webmasters guessed wrong. This blog has pretty much been built on the power of social media, and I’m constantly working to improve its retention rate.
It’s all about “making your site sticky”.
Strong Titles Are Rule One of Website Stickiness
One of the most productive ways to make your website sticky is to work on writing great titles for your articles and blog posts. Strong titles serve three purposes:
- Proper use of keywords in your title determine how your site will be indexed
- Keywords combined with compelling text make good links which draw in readers from search engines and social media sites
- Once a visitor arrives, compelling text and keywords attract them to other articles and posts on your site
You’ve probably heard a good headline is the most critical part of a sales letter. A top class copywriter will produce many different versions of the same headline, and test them against a control headline which will have been developed with experience and research. Writing a good title for your article or blog post follows the same principles as writing a good headline for a sales letter.
You may not want to go through a testing process, and if your permalink would be effected it isn’t a good idea to change things and break existing links. But over time you’ll learn what is more effective and apply those skills to new posts and articles.
Stress the Benefit and Initiate Action
Just like in a sales letter headline, a good article title will highlight the strongest benefit to the reader. You are trying to get your readers to “buy in” and read what you’ve written. You may not think you’re offering a product for sale, but your product could be seen as the rest of the article.
More than stressing the benefit, your title must be compelling. It must put the reader in action, even if that action is simply reading your article. Your headline can call the reader to action by pushing or pulling, enticing the reader with a promise or pushing the visitor to read from a fear of missing something valuable.
- Pull: This is the idea of leading a donkey where you want him to go by enticing him with a carrot. When writing a title, the carrot would be something your target reader wants. Do you know what your readers want?
- Push: If the donkey can be enticed with a carrot, he might be pushed if he’s trying to get away from something he doesn’t want. A title that “pushes” might cause the reader to worry they’ll miss out on something or experience failure if they don’t read your article.
Study the Pros
Thousands of sales letters exist on the internet for you to study. Compile a swipe file of effective letters and imitate the techniques used by expert copywriters. If you go to the affiliate networks such as Clickbank and PayDotCom, you will be given a clear indication of which products on the marketplace are selling well. The sales copy that is working to sell these products is there for anyone to study.
You can also study online materials created by some of the world’s best copywriters. Copywriting legend Gary Bencivenga offers a free instructional newsletter. The late Gary Halbert’s website has many of his old letters and copywriting tips. Many of today’s top copywriters have blogs where writing a headline is sure to be discussed regularly.
Visitors Can Read, But Will They?
Almost daily I hear bloggers and webmasters looking for excuses. “It’s all about content, if you have great content you will succeed.”
But the web is increasingly competitive. For every post or article you write there are thousands of others competing for the same reader. Sure you know your article will solve the world’s problems, but will you convince anyone else if it’s never read?
Call it SEO, SMO, SEM, SMM, or whatever you like. The fact is, these practices are the things you must do if you want to get noticed on the crowded streets of today’s web.
If you haven’t signed up for National SEO Month, why not do it now? We’ll perform small daily SEO tasks like those in this article throughout the month of April, working to optimize our sites to their greatest advantage.
Even if you forget about the quality of Digg traffic for example, the link building benefits are amazing! I must say i have heard about the importance of your title and first 3 sentences etc yet i rarely implement any of these myself.
SEO’s last blog post..Even more resources for link development
Hey SEO,
You’re right, the links are excellent. But if you’re looking for something more than just page rank, you’ve got to get readers to click through. Then you’ve got to get them to actually read your article, or even better read two or three. Optimized titles are one way to do that.
Thanks for the comments! I do appreciate your participation.
Yep, i will keep this in mind next time I’m blogging.
PS: PR is the last thing i am worried about
Does not mean anything to me.
Thanks for your blogs!
SEO’s last blog post..Even more resources for link development
I’m in total agreement with this, and in fact one of my latest videos is about titles as relates to chapter titles in a book at.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ANDurelWrjs
You’ll notice something I do at the end that keeps people wanting more too.
I also have one called “Are Your Titles Juicy?” That is for anything - book, sales letter, blog post, etc.
You can have the most compelling call to action in the world, but if your title doesn’t grab them, they’ll never see it.
Curious - are people really that concerned with page rank?
The Story Lady
The Story Lady’s last blog post..Of Lungs and Medicine and Rainforests and World Internet Challenge
People claim they aren’t worried about page rank, yet they seem quite interested in back links which aren’t going to give them any traffic. I look at page rank, I’ll admit it even though such an admission is likely to leave me shunned
However, I don’t really do anything to increase my PR. It does matter in some arenas if you want to sell advertising on your site.
Thanks for the video link, I’ll take a look.
Nice post, I had a peak in traffic from Stumble recently and expected my bounce rate to go through the roof but its under 35%, I must be doing something right, right?!
I do believe that you’re wright: a good title means more people risking their time to look at your content.
Good content is of even more importance, nevertheless.
Real good articles are relayed to the wider web community by mentionning them in other articles or in microblogpostings.
I’m a microblogger and if I see real good content I let others know using twitter, jaiku, fanfou, snockles, khaces and so on.
The better the article, the more effort I’m willing to let people now about it.
jansegers’s last blog post..The commentluv wordpress plugin
MMBlogging: Great job on the bounce rate. I’m sure you are smart about how you use titles.
jansegers: With Twitter you’re pressed even more for good titles, considering the space limitations.
As a freelance journalist, I get fresh insights on headline writing from BBC News, CNN, Associated Press, and the New York Times. They have their own style and each style will teach the proper way to write story title.
Search for Best Webhost’s last blog post..How to Become Billionaire Like Facebook Founder
Webhost: You bring up a good point about copying existing headline styles. I’m sure in their own way they make use of keywords to attract reader attention, and are skilled at creating interest.
You make a good point about having interesting headlines and a strong intro and it’s certainly something that can help you noticed on social news sites like Digg and Reddit. (You’d be surprised at the amount of people who vote up a story based on a headline alone).
I think getting the people to your site is only half of the battle though. You need something to keep people there. The page needs to be easy to read too. Most people will just scan your content so sub-headings are important as well.
It’s also a good idea prominently place your RSS feed/Newsletter above the fold. That way you’ll at least attract a small portion of the visitors to come back to your site more regularly. You can add a related content option or include links to other pages on your site within the content. People are more likely to stick around if you have a few interesting articles rather than just one.
Like you say, the traffic from social news/bookmark sites is not useless and can help to grow a site very quickly.
Chris’s last blog post..Three Month Overview of Social News and Bookmark Popular Topics
Your intro and your headign may hook people in, but you have to keep visitors on the line, content has to be short, concise and interesting otherwise they’ll lose interest quick and all the clever headlines in the world won’t keep them around.
Shane,
You’re right the content is important, but often the reader won’t get that far unless your headlines are strong as well.
You can do everything right, but sometimes its pure luck.
I think writing titles for humans is important, but you need to have your keyword thrase in the header for search engines.