Writing effective blog headlines

Which headlines catch your attention and why?

This  ought to be a question that every better blogger asks themselves and answers before creating their own.

Once a draft headline (blog title) has been created then assessing it by answering additional questions makes good sense too.

1. Is it specific?
2. Is it focused?
3. Is it credible?
4. Does it touch a nerve?
5. Is it easy to understand?
6. Does it provoke curiosity?
7. Does it invite conversation?
8. Does it have a newsy element?
9. Does it deliver a complete message?
10. Does it make a unique claim or statement?
11. Does it offer a compelling benefit for reading?

Headline (Blog Title) Tips

(1)    The primary purpose of the headline is to get attention.  The way to do this is to write a headline that attracts reader interest (the hook).

(2)  The secondary purpose of the headline is to  capture the essence of the post in a nutshell, and makes readers eager to find out more about  what the body of your post contains.

(3)   The best way to write a good headline is to keep it simple and direct. Be clever only when being clever is called for.  Don’t yield to the temptation to write cute headlines or slogans unless doing so fits especially well with the content and tone of the story.

(4)   Effective headlines include keywords. They have  logical sentence structure, active voice and strong present-tense verbs.  As with any good writing, good headlines are driven by good verbs. The rule of thumb is: use present tense for immediate past information, past tense for past perfect, and future tense for coming events.

(5)  Do not capitalize every word. Most headline words appear in lower-case letters.  The first word in the headline  should be capitalized as should all proper nouns.

Headline Categories

In The Copywriter’s Handbook, copywriter extraordinaire Bob Bly provides  eight time-tested headline categories.

I find it helpful to check this list of possible headline categories before I write a headline so maybe you will  benefit from doing the same  thing too.

The eight headline categories  are:

1. Direct Headlines go straight to the heart of the matter, without any attempt at cleverness;
2. Indirect Headlines use curiosity to raise a question in the reader’s mind, which the body copy answers;
3. News Headlines are  self-explanatory;
4. How to Headline are likewise self-explanatory;
5. A Question Headline must do more than simply ask a question, it must be a question the reader can empathize with or would like to see answered;
6. The Command Headline boldly tells the reader what he needs to do, thus, the first word should be a strong verb demanding action;
7. The Reason Why Headline is a listing technique that underlies the blogger “list” posts (the text in the body of your posts consists of a numbered list of ______________ which you then incorporate into the headline;
8. Testimonial Headlines present outside proof that you offer great value in your post.

Basic SEO elements for bloggers

I’ve had this post on the back burner while coping with several unexpected events in my life that required attention.

It seems that it was a good thing that I did because Tim Grice has published a post  called SEO Content Writing – How To Produce Great Content That Increases Rank that ties in perfectly with this one.

1.   Keywords in <title>

Your title should succinctly state what the contents of the post are. Clever and catchy titles may bring an flush of traffic but they do not continue to deliver readers who are specifically searching for the content that your post has. Use a keyword or keyword phrase as close to the start of the title as possible. Also use them in sub-titles found throughout the blog post. If you need some guidance then check out Writing effective blog headlines.

Take a look at the title tags on your pages, are they targeted towards your chosen keywords? Are they relevant to the pages they are situated on? If not now’s the time to change them. Take into account the keyword prominence … Tim Grice in 15 Ways To Enhance Your Sites SEO Today

2.   Keywords in headings <H3>, <H4>, etc.

Using keywords in headings is advisable provided the text does pertain to the  the particular keyword used.

3.   Keywords at the beginning

Search engines put more weight on the earliest words on a page, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well. Potential readers scanning search result pages see the words found at the beginning first, so if your keywords are positioned at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

4.   Keywords in anchor texts

Establishing your credibility around a specific topic with your readers by engaging in ethical practice and linking is important.  Anchoring links with your targeted keyword text us very important.  If you are linking to authoritative posts  within your niche you should anchor those links with your chosen keywords.  Search engines  view  the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site  as getting a vote from this site and also for the weight of the specific keyword. You ought to be linking to authoritative posts in your niche using correct anchor text,  and also using the correct anchor text in your posts to link to your older related content posts, rather than “click here”.

5.   Keywords in <alt> tags

The Google crawler cannot read image scripts and therefore using the ALT attribute (providing a description) will allow you to tell the crawler what the image is referring to. If you want your images to be indexed by the search spiders then give your images the full treatment (TITLE tag, ALT tag Description).

6.   Keywords in the body

From a SEO perspective keywords or keyword phrases can be used throughout the post. However, take note that Google will penalize those who resort to keyword stuffing that diverges from natural flow of the text. From the readers perspective, keep it natural and use key words or keyword phrases only if it’s a natural “fit”.

7.   Unique content that’s frequently updated

Original content (relevant content, that differs  from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your blog’s rankings, and frequent changes are favored as they bring search engine attention.  Aim to constantly add new content  and only make small updates to existing content. Do not create 404s (page not found)

8.   Site Accessibility

If the site or any pages on it are inaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other reasons, then the site can’t be indexed. See: WordPress: How to Maintain and Track Links

9.   Sitemap

It is important to get a Google webmasters account and generate and submit an up-to-date sitemap. Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

10.   Self hosting wordpress bloggers

Here is a really good article discussing SEO for self hosted wordpress blogs. There’s also an All in one SEO plugin that I use and recommend. I also recommend reading SEO for WordPress – A quick guide If you search the internet you will find free SEO themes for wordpress installs and over here are more free SEO themes. Lastly, there are paid themes likeThesis that you can purchase.

Related posts found in this blog:

Blogging: SEO images enhance your posts

How to structure a reader and search engine friendly blog

Happy blogging!

If you have a new blog, whether you are blogging on WordPress.com software , then don’t be surprised if you can’t find it on Google or on Yahoo or Bing immediately. It can take from 4 – 6 weeks or more to add any new sites, but this post contains ten tips for expediting the process.

OMG! I can’t find my blog on Google

If you have a new blog, whether you are blogging on WordPress.com software , then don’t be surprised if you can’t find it on Google or on Yahoo or Bing immediately.  It can take from 4 – 6 weeks  or more to add any new sites, but this post contains ten tips for expediting the process.

What to do to get your site indexed if you are a wordpress.com blogger.

(1) Be  sure your visibility settings for your blog do allow search spider access, and you know the correct URL for your blog (Tip: no wordpress.com URLs contain “www”).

I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers – This is the setting used by most blogs. It lets everyone read your blog and allows your blog to be included in search engines and other content sites.

(2)  Use  ismyblogworking? to see if what you can’t find has actually has been indexed.  ismyblogworking.com will now double-check if your robots.txt file has a rule that would prevent Googlebot or the other main search engines from indexing your posts. It checks each of the post links listed in your RSS feed against your robots.txt file to confirm that the search bots are allowed to fetch them. If you’ve forgotten to change your Visibility setting to allow search engines, it’ll warn you.

(3) Set up a Google Webmasters account and verify ownership your blog with the big search engines. Note: Even if you do not verify the blog the content will be indexed by search engines so don’t feel panicky about this please.

(4)  Note also that WordPress.com automatically supplies sitemaps for our blogs to search engines – we bloggers do nothing.

Is there anything that will expedite the search engine indexing process?

It’s my belief that blogs with posts containing unique content published frequently the catches wide spread attention can definitely  result in quick  indexing by search engines. I also  believe if you can give a “yes” answer to most of the following questions that the process of getting your blog indexed may be expedited.

(1)  Do you publish original content posts frequently? Have you applied basic SEO to your posts, including using appropriate anchor text and backlinking to the posts  in the most authoritative blogs in your niche, and using appropriate and relevant keywords in your post titles, subtitles and in the natural flow of the text?

Refer to: 5 Google Webmasters Video Tutorials and Two SEO Videos for Bloggers

(2)  Do your headlines (titles) accurately describe the contents in your posts ?

(3)  Do  you understand how to tag and categorize by assigning only relevant tags and/or categories to your posts?

(4)  Have you optimized your images?

(5) Have other bloggers backlinked to your posts in their posts?

(6) Have other bloggers chosen to link to your blog in their blogrolls?

(7) Have you encouraged commenting and have your  posts received a number of high quality comments?  Google looks favorably upon posts that have received high quality comments, and the more of them there are the better it is for gaining search engine attention for your blog.

(8)  Have you promoted the posts you have published and established meaningful relationships with other bloggers in your niche?

(9)  Have any of your posts “gone viral“?

(10)  Have you been a guest blogger on sites with a high PageRank and received backlinks to your blog from it?

Do you have any ideas you would like to share with new bloggers for gaining search engine attention?

How to remove write protection from Pen Drive

How to remove write protection from Pen Drive 

Actually there are many working ways and methods in which you can do this, here in this post I am listing out all the working methods to remove write protection from the pen drive, check them one after another and you can easily do it.

Normally when a Pen drive is write protected it will show an error something like this when you try to write your pen drive.

1. Editing the Registries to Remove write protection from USB drive 

Follow the steps one after another to more write protection from the Pen drive.

1. Press CTRL + R to open the RUN box,

2. Type REGEDIT and hit enter

3. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SYSTEM>CurrentControlSet>Control>StorageDevicePoliciesand hit enter.

4. Give a double click on the WRITE PROTECT and a box will open in that enter the Value as 0 and press OK button

5. Now restart your PC and again connect your USB pen drive to your computer and verify.That’s it hopefully it will work.

Note: - In case you can’t find the “StorageDevicesPolicies” in the Registry settings follow the steps below

1.Open your Notepad and copy the below code to itcd\reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies" /t Reg_dword /v WriteProtect /f /d 1.

2. Now save this as add.bat (it should be with .bat extension or else it won’t work) and run it. 

3.Now continue the above process and it will work fine.

2. Formatting the Pen drive before OS boots to Remove Write protection

Follow the below steps carefully to remove write protection from the USB storage drives
1. Shut down your PC/LAPTOP

2. Connect your USB drive to your PC/LAPTOP and turn it ON. While the system is booting pres F8 continuously and advanced booting option screen will open.

3. In that select Safe mode with command prompt.

4.  After the files loads, in the command prompt navigate to the drive of your pen drive.
At first it will look something like this C:\windows\system32>
now let your drive letter is “H”. Then you have to type C:\windows\system32>H:
and hit enter

5. Now type
H:\>format H:
it will again ask you for confirmation of Yes or No (Y/N). Type Y and hit Enter.
By doing this your pen drive will get completely formatted, which will remove the write protection from it.

3. Using Command prompt to remove Write protection from Sandisk pen-drive

Follow the below mentioned steps to remove write protection from the PEN DRIVES

1. Press CTRL + R and open the RUN box.

2. Type CMD to open the command prompt window

3. In the command prompt type DISKPART and hit enter

4.  A new command window will open, in that again type LIST DISK and hit Enter

5. Now again type “Attributes disk clear read-only” and hit enter

You can even try this method to format your Pen drive completely and remove write protection from it.

4. Formatting the Pen Drive to Remove write protection from the pen drive

Here is the step by step procedure to remove the write protection from the pen drive
1. Open your desktop and give a Right click on the MY COMPUTER icon and select MANAGE from the list.

2. From the left panel select the DISK MANAGEMENT under STORAGE

3. Now give a Right click on our Pen drive and select format from it.

4. Conform it by clicking again on the YES and finally click OK to format