Great Content Starts with the Title

When writing content for the web, the first place to start is with the title. This is the single most heavily weighed on page aspect of SEO. Google and other search engines rely on the title as a big part of determining what the page is about, so it's important to think about your title from the perspective of a search engine. Better yet, when determining a title, think about the types of keywords for which you'd like to see your page show up.

Keep Your Title Short and to the Point

When choosing a title, try to keep it short, and include only those keywords you really want to go after. Better yet, use a phrase that you would expect someone to punch in to find what you're writing. As an example, if you want to write something on Why your Should Hire a Lawyer to Help with Foreclosure, think about how someone would use those terms in a search engine. They might search for "how to stop foreclosure", or "foreclosure help". It's actually pretty unlikely that that the term lawyer would appear in the most common search phrases, so incorporate those search term in the title. You can write something like, "How a Lawyer can Help Stop Foreclosure", or "Get Help from a Lawyer to Stop a Foreclosure". Alternatively, you can use a colon to help target an exact keyword phrase; "How to Stop Foreclosure: Get Foreclosure Help from a Lawyer".

Don't Forget Your H2 Titles

After you've got your title, make a quick outline of your article or guide. Use that to structure the flow of your article, and make sure you have subtitles (H2 and H3 titles) that are directly related to your page title. In the above example, your subtitles might be something like, "Negotiating with Your lender", "Legal Options to Prevent Foreclosure", "Bankruptcy and Foreclosure" and so on. The sub titles are another thing that major search engines will use as a guide to determine the relevancy of a page to a given search term. Subtitles also function as a great way to organize the content on the page and make it easier to digest for a researching consumer. One of the biggest mistakes we see lawyers make when writing content for the web is to write a long, unbroken string of text. While the content might be great, a webpage with nothing but long paragraphs can appear intimidating and "unfriendly" to many people. Web pages should be well organized an "scannable" so that people can find information quickly.

If You're an Experthub Contributor, We've Got Some Ideas for You

The SEO team at Experthub recently did some keyword research, as well as researching the keyword strength and page rank of pages on the Experthub Legal Network, and created a list of titles that would make for great legal guides, and have an excellent shot at getting indexed quickly, and generating more traffic to your profile. Take a look at our Wanted Page, and see if there is anything that you'd be interested in writing.
As always, these pages will get some SEO massaging and back-links from related, ranked pages to make sure they get indexed and ranked quickly, and get you more visitors to your profile page.

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