Are you gambling away your writing revenue?(Image from a graphic by OpenClipartVectors/Pixabay/CC0 1.0)
First words of your post introduce your topic to the reader. They will also end up in search results and in social media shares of your link. So it’s important to choose your opening words carefully, and not to waste those first few lines with any information that isn’t relevant to the topic of your post.
Think of your opening paragraph as the description that will show up when your link is shared to Facebook or Google+ – because that is often what happens with your post! This first bit of your post will also show up in search results on Google and other search engines, and sometimes even on Pinterest.
It used to be that we were told to put a focus keyword in the first five words, and to be sure that the keyword appeared twice in that first paragraph. These things are not as important any more: Google is moving away from complex formulations for SEO, and more towards a natural flow of writing. But it’s still important to get right down to business in the first paragraph. You want those first 100-200 characters to give a clear sense of what your post is about, so potential readers will know that your content is worth checking out!
I went to pin a friend’s post yesterday, and when I looked at the pin description it began with, “Image by Pixabay.” I wondered if Pinterest had picked up the description or title for his featured image, but when I went back to the post I noticed these words beneath his featured image.
Instead of using the image caption to supply the attribution, it looks as if he had simply begun his post with those completely irrelevant words.
Sadly, whenever that post comes up in a Google search result the description will now say, “Image by Pixabay.” And when the link is shared across several social networks, the Facebook and Google+ posts will also begin with those same meaningless words. Potential readers will have no idea what the post is about – but they’ll be very clear where the illustration came from!
This is something I’ve seen on many social writing sites. People will begin their posts with greetings and local weather reports, as if they are writing a letter to a pal in another city. They’ll use the opening paragraph to ramble about personal news. They’ll even fill the first few lines with hashtags, a copyright notice or author bio, a disclaimer, or even just a repeat of the title followed by their byline.
None of these things is of any interest to your audience – those anonymous millions of people, out on the Wide World Web. It’s important to remember that your blog posts aren’t your personal diary – or at least they shouldn’t be, if you want to see any money from your writing!
If you’re trying to bring in search engine traffic and views from social media links, for the most part you are writing for strangers who don’t really care what the weather was like when you wrote your post. They are looking to find out how to create a Twitter list or how big to make an image for Pinterest, or maybe just for a great recipe for carrot soup! Whatever it is they’re searching for, they want to see in those first few words that this is what you are providing. So you need to fill those first lines of your post with information-rich text, with keywords, with some kind of proof that they haven’t landed on the wrong page.
So if you’ve been wasting those opening lines and filling them up with things best reserved for the end of your post, time to shake things up! This is a habit that needs to change. Remember, use the opening characters of any page or post to give the reader and the search engine a preview of the rest of the post!
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View Comments
thanks for your useful tips.
I do noticed that most wordpress blogs openings are rants about what to cook for today, something going on in the household, pets problems before they head for the topic of the title.
I didn't know that the first 5 sentences were the crucial keywords to lead high search in google.
Thanks for your reminder
@peachpurple Getting those keywords into the first 100 characters is not as crucial as it used to be for SEO, but it does still add weight in your favour. What's even more important is making sure that your social shares will contain some relevant text. On WordPress blogs, there is an option to write a post summary that will be used for search results and social sharing. It's good to write a summary that gives the reader a taste of what the post is about. It will help get you more clicks!
A very helpful and informative post! I didn't know that the first few lines were crucial in terms of search engines. I learn so much about blogging everyday from your posts. Thanks for sharing!
@swalia It's not so much about SEO or search ranking; it's more that your opening words are what's going to show up in the Google snippet. If the first paragraph of your post is a weather report or some other chatter completely unrelated to your topic, the potential reader will look at it and decide to pass right over. People are looking for focused, information-dense writing. They don't want to read big blocks of rambling text to get to the heart of the matter.
Another way of looking at it is to write for the search engines.
That is when keyword density comes in.
If we are focus on writing informative articles with enough keywords, we will not ramble on and on about our own problem.
@scheng1 As long as that writing is natural, yes, the keyword density can help a great deal in maintaining a focus and avoiding a rambling post. Some people - like you - seem to have a talent for writing posts that flow very naturally while still hitting the right density for keywords.
Other people do struggle to be natural, so they might be better off to just write for latent semantic indexing, rather than strict percentages for exact keyword matches.
I suppose I have the gift of the gab to hit the nail on the head :grin:
Yes, the opening paragraph smut be meaning full and explaining the the next coming events thus the readers will find interest in your post and will read fully from the beginning till end.
Some people will share or like an article simple based on whether they think their friends will like the article’s title. More likely, however, is that your title encourages someone to read your excellent content.
You might write a title that you really love and think is clever as hell but unless it is leading to these types of responses you will be wasting your time.
It takes a lot of practice and it also requires a lot of testing to see what works and what sort of tiny variations you can make to elicit a big change in performance.
But there are some things you can do every time, sort of like a routine, to ensure that you get the best possible chance of success.
Today’s post is not going to be a formula that you can follow – mostly because I don’t follow one myself. Rather, what I want to do is just give you a few different things that you can think about and do each time you sit down to write.
Always know who you are writing for and what issues they are having. Successful websites that are aimed at professional corporates “feel” completely different to music sites for teenagers. That’s important.