Article Marketing Secrets:Benefits of Subheadings in Writing Articles
We are almost at the end of the Article Marketing Secrets series, with only two other posts to follow.
When someone opens your article because they were attracted by your attention-grabbing title, you are one step ahead of the game. But…what if they opened it and saw an article with 450-600 words with only two or three paragraphs, how long do you believe they’d keep reading?
When writing articles white space is very important, and a good way to break up your article body is to have sub-headings.
Subheadings – What are they?
- Sub-headings stand out from the rest of the article because the font may be a size larger or you may bold the text. You may decide not to bold the text, but underline instead.
- They tell the reader what to expect-what will be discussed- in that section of the article.
- Subheadings are good for navigation and save time because they allow the reader to zero in on the part of the article that has most appeal to him or her.
Benefits of Article Subheadings :
- In addition to the foregoing points, subheadings break your article into digestible parts that allow your readers to absorb just what they need.
- They help you, the writer, to stay focused. It’s easy when writing articles that are approximately 450 – 600 words to lose track of what you wrote before and so you write it again. Readers do not appreciate that and feel it’s a waste of their time to continue reading. It will affect your credibility as well, because the reader could conclude that you do not have enough information and so you need to ‘fill the space.’
- The use of subheadings is a useful and effective tool for search engine optimization.
- Your subheadings should contain keywords and long-tail keywords, where possible. These help the search engine crawlers or spiders to define your content and increase your search engine rankings.
For this Article Marketing Secrets series I did additional research so that I can improve my article writing and article marketing, and am delighted to share the information I learned. This is another benefit of Article Marketing: it can enhance your expertise in your niche so that you can become an expert in your field and people will begin to look to you as the “go to” person for additional information.
In my next post we will discuss the conclusion to your article. See you then! In the meantime, please leave your comments regarding the use of subheadings. Do you use them in writing articles? Do you believe they add value? If you're not currently using subheadings, will you start doing so?
I agree that subheadings are very helpful in reading an article. They help me locate the material that I am interested in reading.
1I think subheadings make an article look polished and professional.
I should probably use more subheadings in my blog articles.
Thanks for an informative article!
Hi Janette, Thanks for sharing your thoughts and you just added another reason for using subheadings, which I really like. They make your article look polished and professional! Great tip…and I’ll include that next time 🙂
2Thank you for this article and the suggestion of using subheadings. The use of subheadings does make it much easier for the reader and captures their attention. This is definetly something I will start implementing!
3Thanks for the reminder to use subheadings. I love bullets, but I don’t use subheads enough.
I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
4After having read countless long and difficult to navigate articles in university I realized how much more I got when things were broken up a bit on the page. Sub headings (as my grade 8’s commented one year when I was teaching English) make your brain hurt less when you have to read it! lol It’s true, it is easier to focus on the paper itself because it looks better. Fact is your brain likes stuff grouped and hates too much at once and subheading help you out with that.
Great job Yvonne! A very nicely done article about an often over looked topic.
Keep well,
5Bonnie
Yvonne,
I often see article writers forget good content copywriting which you have been teaching in these posts. They forget white space and subheadings. They forget that readers are sit going to the article and want to scan it quickly to see if they want to read the whole article.
Your example of how you used subheadings is perfect.
6Didn’t think about using subheadings, but I do put things in a list format for some of my stuff…that way it isn’t like a story, but gets to key points. I’ll have to check out the previous series to this. GREAT job!
7Sherri, Bonnie, Sheila, and Leona: You have all shared some great points that make this post even richer. If even one point can help someone else then we’ve all accomplished our goal.
I’m really glad I spent the time doing this added research as I realized how many steps I’d not been implementing in my own article writing and as Sheila mentioned it is all a part of copywriting and many of us have little or no training in that.
8Hi Lynn,
So good to see you here. Bullets are definitely good because they do draw attention and I use them a lot, but the subheadings are a little more specific for the reader 🙂
This is the second time this week my spam filter has filtered out legitimate comments as yours was way down. I wonder how many comments I’ve missed this way. My take away lesson for the week: do a quick check of my spam folder everyday.
Thanks, Lynn.
9Thanks for sharing the post Yvonne 🙂
A website visitor is not actually reading the articles, he is scanning it. He will try to gather maximum amount of information with minimum time. So splitting the topic in to the subheadings will ease the process.
10Great idea, I’ve seen it used on a fair few blogs and it works well. (as long as it’s written good) It also gives an idea of what the reader should expect from the article, and not when you read something and find it’s nothing like you intended.
11Rojish: You hit it right on the head that visitors do more scanning than reading. And we can understand why. There’s just so much information out there that it’s almost impossible to absorb it all so we have to make it easier for our readers to hone in on the key points they’re most concerned about. Great to have your comments 🙂
Peter J: The use of subheadings is something we should definitely use on our blog posts, especially when we write longer posts, say over 300 words. That’s something I do sporadically, but am going to make a constant part of my posts. It makes for better reader satisfaction and encourages our visitors to return. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and great to see you 🙂
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