Keywords that grab your attention

I the overloaded world of information that is the Web, people are (because they need to in order to survive) finding out ways and means to get peoples attention. Attention is in short supply and extremely valuable in todays times. People who write for the web have found out how to use certain keywords to grab people’s attention.

I would like to go through some of the keywords I’ve noticed. This is by no means an exhaustive list so please drop a comment of keywords that you’ve noticed people use to grab our attention.

You’ll also find a lot of the keywords in my list don’t fit neatly into one category, but sometimes fit into multiple categories, and by all means, the more categories a title fits into the more attention grabbing they will be.

• First off there’s the extremes:
  LATEST, OLDEST, TALLEST, SHORTEST, MOST, LEAST, BEST, WORST, etc, you get the idea the more extreme, the more people take notice.
• Anything out of the ordinary:
  BIZARRE, STRANGE, CRAZY, AMAZING, VIRAL, etc. You know, stuff you don’t see everyday.
• Emotional:
  FUNNY, HILARIOUS, HORRIFIC, etc. Anything that sparks an emotional response.
• Then there is anything numbers in them. I see this one a lot.
  TOP x … , x WAYS TO … , etc. (x stands for any number for those of your that didn’t know)
  Why are we attracted to numbers on the web, especially in titles?
  1. The Web is overloaded with text. Almost everywhere you go on the web, bar image and video specifc sites, text content is more proliferate than anything else. So when we see numbers, all of sudden we pay attention, because it’s something different.
  2. Numbers suggest an article that is in point form and easy to scan.
  3. You can gauge how long the article will be and how much of your attention it will take to scan it.
  4. We like step-by-step, don’t-make-me-think guides to anything and everything in life.
• That leads us to the next keywords that grab our attention. Simple guides to everything in life:
  HOW TO, TIPS, x STEPS TO, etc. Don’t we just love those?
• Then onto news related keywords such as
  OFFICIAL, ATTENTION, BREAKING, JUST IN, etc, anything that suggest what you’re about to say is extremely new and important.
  Also, mentioning a company that is currently making noise in the media such as FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, APPLE, etc, helps to grab attention.
• And lastly, but not least, SEX. How could I not include that one. 🙂