Formatting Article Titles for Submission

If you write and submit a lot of articles to business directories,  you are aware that there are usually strict submission guidelines that need to be followed. All parts of the article are included, including the title.

Many of the article directories have specific rules about article titles and if they are not adhered to, your article will most likely be rejected. The rest of your article may totally be top notch but if you don’t follow the rules regarding the title to the letter, you won’t get anywhere. It is a shame that if your article is rejected because of a formatting issue. Your title must attract real people and encourage them to click on the link and read your article. You need to make sure that your article title is as interesting as possible.

Don’t underestimate the power of a title

You need to recognize how important titles are and how much thought you need to put into writing them. No doubt, you are spending a lot of time and putting in a great deal of careful effort into writing the body of your article. Are you devoting the same kind of care to your article title? If you are haphazardly putting your title together without too much thought, you are making a mistake. Of course, since you have put all of that wonderful effort into writing your article, you don’t want to do anything that would cause it to be rejected because of a technicality.

There are some standard formatting rules that need to be followed:

Title case

Your titles should always be in sentence case. Sentence case means that the first letter of every major word in the title (not articles like “the” and ”a”). You shouldn’t ever use all capital letters in your title. All capital letters just doesn’t look professional.

Impeccable spelling and grammar

If you have any grammatical or spelling errors in your title, the decision maker at the business directory probably won’t even bother reading beyond the title. He or she may think (and justifiably so) that if you don’t care enough to ensure that there are no mistakes in your title, why would you care about the rest of it. It makes your content seem like it is mediocre at best. Errors can easily result in your article being rejected. One of the critical places to put strategic and effective keywords or key phrases is in your title. The keywords and key phrases will be picked up by the search engines. If, on the other hand, you have errors in your title, people who are searching for you won’t be able to find you and that defeats your purpose entirely.

The length of your title

The goal of the article title (always) is to let the reader understand what your article is about. If you don’t have enough words in your title, it will be very difficult for your readers to understand what your article is about and to make an informed decision about whether they want to continue reading. A large number of publishers have a minimum word count for the title of two words. Your title needs to be long enough to communicate clearly what your article is about.

Punctuation

You shouldn’t use quotation marks or most other punctuation marks in your title. Many punctuation marks are not compatible with html and they will be lost in the translation. Additionally, you shouldn’t put a period at the end of your title because it causes the reader to pause and you don’t want them to pause. You want to have a continuity and a flow that is not interrupted. Readers are easily distracted anyway. You don’t want to do anything that causes further distractions. Many article directories will reject your article because of a period in the title.

Conclusion

As small of a thing as the title of your article seems, it isn’t small at all. There is a great deal of thought that goes into the title and writing it so that it entices your readers and compels them to continue reading the rest of your article and then interacting with you and building a relationship with you that will last for a very long time. Remember, you must always write the title with the objective of getting the article accepted for publication and, at the same time, enticing the reader and causing them to want to keep reading what you are writing.

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