What is the best start for an online article?

This post is for all bloggers, journalists, webmasters and whoever want to get their article read. Among us live lots of great writers and journalists who provide quality content to the internet. Quality and genuine content always get the highest respect from the readers. They refer your article on their blogs, social networking media and also word of mouth. I would say getting back links is the electronic version of word of mouth. Somebody linking to your article means that he recommends you. May be that’s why Google thought of considering back links for their page ranking.

You could be a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert or a good writer, I guess you both like to see your article popular. For it to become popular it should first get listed on search engines. So if you are a SEO expert you know what to do (If not Google for “SEO best practices” and you will end up with lots of quality articles). SEO is a very competitive task nowadays. So getting to the first page is really tough. Even if you are on the first page the probability of somebody reading your article decreases as you go down the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Sometimes people do not just click on the first result they get, blankly. Since SEO is very popular nowadays and most of the people aware that company webmasters try to trick search engines, they sometimes do not click on the first result they get. Sometimes they scan through the first four results reading their titles as well as the small descriptions Google gives.

It is very important for the content owners to understand how these short descriptions are generated. If the search engine finds the searched keyword in your article it will try to squeeze in those sentences there. If the search keyword matches only your title the first few sentences of your article will be shown. So your first sentence should give a complete idea about your whole article. Writers might think that sometimes this will compromise creativity and literature part of your article. Then it that case you can have small introduction section or few lines (point wise) explaining what this article is about or to whom this article is intended for. Then you can start your creative writing. If you practice this method then your creative writing won’t be compromised plus you will have a quality description in the SERP.


Example

Original Article: http://the-useful.blogspot.com/2010/04/beautiful-sri-lanka-is-this-another.html

Article title: Beautiful Sri Lanka – Is this another spam mail? – NO, I have visited most of these places

Browser title of the web page: ThE uSeFuL: Beautiful Sri Lanka – Is this another spam mail? – NO, I have visited most of these places

First paragraph: With the ending of the war against terrorism, and Sri Lanka’s ground security situation rapidly returning to normalcy, there is certainly considerable focus and interest on the tourism sector, which is expected to bounce back very soon.

SERP screen shot:

So by reading the SERP the reader would know that this article is written by somebody who has visited the places which were shown in the mail which he/she got with the subject “Beautiful Sri Lanka” and from the first sentence (underlined in red in the screen shot) the reader would understand that he is going convey some true facts as well.

Ok now let’s take another example. Say you are going to post an article from somebody very famous and respected. Say you have done all your SEO homework and you have managed to get your article to the first page. Now we’ll focus on how you have started your article. If it is your own elaboration of something that person said, then its fine you can think of a good start by keeping what I said above. If it is a copy paste then it is best to have “by thegreatperson” just after the article title or in the article title so the probability of somebody clicking on it increases. Even though it is your own article then you could still go for phrases like “inspired by thegreatperson” or “an interview with thegreatperson”.

May all write good articles and prosper :-)


Further reading,
How can you change the way your site info appears on SERPS?