How much is important for a content to catch the user’s attention? Maybe that’s a good start point for a content. If a content is interesting and can catch the user’s attention, it could bring to you more visits/users from social sharing and search engines.

But how we could attract user’s attention? We could use some tactics, like think out of schemes, bringing some “taboo content” to users (featured image, video, topic), using something  that is basically different from what you could find into other content sources, and so on. That’s not really hard to do, you have to be creative!

Ok, so… we could start talking about “Boobs”? yes, the media that i have uploaded as featured image. It’s a simple “catch attention” content tactic, there is nothing really related to boobs  in this page… so if you are here for contents and for knowledge about web contents optimization, maybe you could be in the right place, otherwise… you are using a really confusing search query or you have done the wrong decision to come here. I’m not joking!

CONTENT – Catching Attention Tactics

The one that i used in this post is a tactic about a linked content (image), i used a certain type of image that suggested to your brain this: ” Oh, oh, oh, what is that? It isn’t normal to see something like this here. Lets see more!” so you clicked the link. It’s like talking about something with a friend and someone screams: BOOBS on the right, he’s surely catching your attention (premising that you are interested in boobs).

This kind of tactics is related on the targeted user we want to reach. For example, if i want to reach, as in this case, a man/woman, maybe an internet addicted, i show him/her what could bring his/her attention (something that he or she knows perfectly and not usually sees). If i want to attract a stupid guy, web newbies, and someone that is desperately searching for money, i’ll show a video or image about lots of money falling from the sky. And so on… we could continue to infinite matches about people and interests to catch attention about web contents. When we have selected a target we have to focus on what he/it/she/pakos (because i can’t describe what really is pakos, pakos is your best and weird friend) likes. We have to focus on what our potential user likes and create a funny, interesting or   a brutal “one-shot media” to introduce our real content. After that we could proceed in “creation”.

In this phase we have to be creative, we focused the potential target and now we want that our content boosts in social sharing and visualizations. That means we have to make “humor” or “call to action” stimulating attention on something moral, sexual or religious related (sex, tumors, god, violence, bullying), in other words sensitisation, but we have also to care about the context! Sometimes we have the opposite effect, hurting people and losing all the appreciation we have.

If we use humor, the joke have to be related to the content’s topic… or there isn’t any sharing conversion, the same is for religion, social activities and sensitisation in general. (This doesn’t work for BOOBS… boobs are well fit on all kind of contents :D)

However not all “optimizations” to catching attention are done directly on the content. There are some SEO tweaks to do a real catching attention tactic. One of them is to implement the google’s authorship. This will work very good now and i think will work as now only for a little, because all businesses are using it. So now that no all websites/blogs are using a content authorship we can take advantage on others and bring all the benefits . But why is really a good catch attention tactic to use authorship?

Simply because if we look at “two” web results, we choose the one that is “more complete”, that is good at view and we can trust it at first glance, without knowing the final content. Lets see, do a research on google and compare an authorship result with a non-authorship one.

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As you can see, a result without authorship and one with authorship are completely different at the user view.

Our view, at first glance, is focused on the avatar, so the first result we see is the authorship one, also if it isn’t in first position. Because of that i’m saying that this “Trick” could work only now, but when we all (websites/blogs) have this authorship, the joke have no effect on users’s view… no more (all results will have an avatar), or maybe in future there will be some different tactics to use about that.