Article Title: Common Mistakes to Avoid

Every site you submit articles to may have different editorial style guides. Here are some helpful tips to help you get your Articles submission accepted faster:


1. Double-check spelling and word usage in your article title.


2. Commas are allowed, but only in the middle of a title.


3. Do not put a period at the end of your article title.


4. All colons (:) and semicolons (;), long and medium dashes, pipes (|), and slashes (/) are to be replaced with two short dashes (--), or changed to word equivalents.


5. Ampersands (&) and parentheses () are allowed.


6. Quotation marks are allowed to emphasize a part of a title, but not the entire title. Please remove quotes around the entire article as they are superfluous and of no benefit to the author or reader.


7. Microsoft Smart Quotes: Please remove them. They break RSS feeds, emails, etc.


8. Never put an article number in the title of an article.

Example: [Wrong] Dog Grooming Tips-Article #3
Example: [Right] Dog Grooming Tips

Tip: The reader is most likely not privy to how many articles you may have written on a subject. It also creates useless title bloat.


9. Never purposefully use commonly misspelled words in your article title to try and gain traffic from humans who misspell words in their searches. WHY? It's sneaky and it can ruin your credibility as an expert author.


10. Never put a year or date in the title of an article. This greatly reduces the "shelf-life" and marketability of your article.

Tip: If you want to update or "freshen" up your article, update the copyright date in your resource box as a marker that will tell the reader when you originally wrote the article.


Writing articles for syndication means that your content will be read for many years and decades to come. Consider that for a moment before you write your next article title.

Having a smart article title is the key to hooking more readers, but the article title is only the envelope in our article marketing campaign. What's inside your article envelope will determine if the reader is satisfied enough to begin to understand and/or trust you.


Source - Ezine