One of phoneBlogger.net’s best practices when editing your articles is to begin with a strong opening sentence (just like this one).
Doing so meets 3 key objectives:
1. To give the reader an immediate and more in-depth idea of what the article will be discussing, beyond what the title provides.
Articles typically conclude with one or two sentences that succinctly summarize all of the information the reader was just given. By taking one or both of those sentences and moving them to the top, or by restating them, readers know up front what to expect.
2. To serve as a strong, compelling social media excerpt.
When your blog posts are shared to your social media networks or listed on Google, a certain amount of characters are pulled from the beginning of each one. For Google, the excerpt length is 150 characters; for LinkedIn, it’s 250 characters, and so on. While developing our improved article template, we took special care to ensure excerpt lengths were considered.
If the post begins with a strong sentence that summarizes the meat of the article, those social media excerpts are more likely to lure people into reading your post, as opposed to sentences that simply serve to build up the article’s content or storyline.
Let’s use a recent article by Andrea Vacca, Esq., “Financial Infidelity and Divorce: It’s Complicated” as an example :
Andrea’s Google excerpt with the summarizing sentence would be:
The legal, emotional and financial needs of couples divorcing due to “financial infidelity” are often complex. When many people hear that “infidelity”…
Without it, the Google excerpt would read:
When many people hear that “infidelity” was the reason for a divorce, they automatically assume it has to do with sex. More and more often, however, I…
The summarizing sentence precisely pinpoints the subject matter of Andrea’s article.
3. To strengthen your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
You will also notice in the example with the summarizing sentence, there are several keywords that are relevant to Andrea’s practice:
- legal
- couples
- divorce(ing)
- financial infidelity
The excerpt without the summarizing sentence has the following keywords:
- infidelity
- divorce
- sex
These keywords aren’t nearly as targeted as the first set, and expose the author to search terms which they would not want associated with their business.
Our goal is therefore to increase your readership by employing these 3 methods – clearly and concisely – at the very start of your article.
Worrying about such small yet important details is part of the service phoneBlogger provides you.
Amanda Mili
Editor, phoneBlogger.net
Amanda@practicemarketinginc.com
Thank you Amanda for this guest post. It not only shows off your expertise, but also how you help our clients. I’m sure many will gain a further appreciation & new ideas from this article.
~ Vik