HOW TO WRITE BETTER HEADLINES

FOR SEO

Write better headlines for your blog or website for clicks, SEO and social

Content writers at small & large businesses can learn plenty from digital journalists, who know that there is far more to effective headlines than just SEO...

“Headlines make all the difference – curiosity is at the core of it. It is amazing how New Yorker can take a New York Times story, reframe it, write a great headline for it, and sell it to a greater audience.” Mitra Kalita, ideas editor, Quartz

“[It] used to be journalists were not at all worried about the distribution of the story. Reporters did not care much what the headlines said. Today, the headline is important. Journalists are now responsible for selling the story and getting an audience.” Stacy-Marie Ishmael, vice president for communities, Financial Times

HOW JOURNALISTS WRITE ONLINE HEADLINES

Examples of clickbait headlines:

“You won’t believe what happened!!!”

“Guess which son of a film star did something unbelievable?!”

“This the biggest mistake you can make when-”

“How does Kim Kardashian’s bottom...”

These are headlines designed for baiting clicks from social media.

“It’s social copy specifically intended to leave out information to create a curiosity gap. Some of it’s disingenuous. It’s not always, but the reader is always being manipulated.” Jake Beckman, journalist

THE CLICK-BAIT DEBATE

Facebook now discourages these sorts of headlines and clickbaiters can get kicked off the News Feed:

“When we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through. Over time, stories with ‘click-bait’ headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about. So how do we determine what looks like click-bait?

“One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.” Khalid El-Arini, research engineer, Facebook

THE CLICK-BAIT DEBATE

But one man’s perfectly acceptable headline may be another man’s clickbait

THE CLICK-BAIT DEBATE

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, says that clickbait headlines are “super effective at driving traffic and attention, because they’re basically just games.”

Buzzfeed claims that it “doesn’t do clickbait” and advises:

“The only real trick [to a great headline] is that the work has to be good. And the only thing, other than mediocrity, that can really sabotage this strategy is writing a headline that overpromises and a story that underdelivers.

“Great headlines, meanwhile, tell you a lot about what you’re going to read, and persuade you to click because you know you’ll find a story that will satisfy your interest.”

THE CLICK-BAIT DEBATE

WHAT CAN TABLOIDS TEACH US?

Tabloid newspapers have long known how to lure in a reader...

And the MailOnline has also become known for its own click generating headline style, which can often be clickbaity, but are also known for their length and descriptiveness.

Here are some Mail lowlights/highlights:

• ‘ISIS chief executioner winning hearts with his rugged looks’

• ‘Is the bum slip the new side boob? Kate Moss, Miley Cyrus and Rihanna are all fans of a cheeky bottom flash’

• ‘So miracles DO happen! As flesh-eating bug left toddler at death’s door, his mother turned to prayer… and just look at him now’

HOW TO WRITE ONLINE HEADLINES FOR SEARCH ENGINES

Some writers worry that SEO has meant the death of those great headlines, but your pun-based headlines can still maintain sufficient SEO strength.

Go to your CMS to alter your meta-title, then you don’t need to write the same headline for both the article and the page. The difference is that an article title is what you show your readers, and a page title is what you show search engines. Furthermore you can add a meta-description that adds further detail and SEO-relevant terms.

Mashable recommends optimizing your headlines for both SEO and humans, e.g:

“15 Case Studies to Get Your Client on Board With Social Media”

MORE TOP TIPS FOR BETTER HEADLINES

Experiment with the following headline styles, and see which works

How I Think Blog Headlines Should Be Written. This might be the most honest headline but honesty is not always the best policy, particularly in headline writing. Unless you are a widely-acknowledged guru.

The Importance of Writing Headlines. This is straightforward and honest – almost an imperious sort of headline –it might work as an undiscovered Oscar Wilde play but it doesn’t have enough information to lure in the budding blog writer.

The Importance of Writing Awesome Headlines. This is more aspirational, how could people not be awestruck with the idea that some these headlines are going to be Awesome and need to find out more.

The Importance of Writing Awesome Blog Headlines. Now the potential reader and the search engines know its an article about blogs and they’re Awesome.

How to Write Better Headlines. This is a different angle, putting the emphasis more on that the article is going to be a How To, and may even to be a bit of a listicle (list-article) or hinting at the presence of bullet points. Also, this is what people might type in search engines and so is good for SEO, even more so due to Google’s recent emphasis on conversational search.

17 Easy Ways to Write Better Blog Headlines. As this includes the word ‘easy’ it will have undoubted appeal to the time-poor, the lazy and the simple minded. Also numbers are a big seller. And apparently make them odd numbers – research has shown this gets more clicks than even, strangely.

…continued

…continued

Freddie Starr Ate My Headlines. Irreverent headlines have a strong appeal, especially as they can intrigue the reader and lure them into reading something they might not normally. While Google in particular has made concessions to enable headline-writing mavericks to go wild and still not loose too much relevancy, it’s less search-powerful to be less relevant in your headline, I think.

Eight is the magic number, according to Guardian. Research from Outbrain on the Guardian’s online media network, using data collected from 150,000 article headlines, found titles with eight words had online click-through rates that performed 21% better than average.

PHOTOS: 17 Easy Ways Kim Kardashian Says Will Give Your Blog Better Headlines and Make Them Awesome. Or forget about 8 and just go for it. This could be the Buzzfeed-MailOnline approach. Long, detailed, celebrities, photos, with some added numbers, awesome and easy.

Headlines with questions work well, or do they? More research from Outbrain found titles posing a query for the reader had higher click-through rates than those ending with an exclamation mark or full stop. I’m not sure about their advice to use three exclamation marks (!!!) instead of just one, even though they argued these headlines received almost twice as many clicks as those with other punctuation marks. This tallies in with the What, Why and How styles used by Quartz. See also Betteridge’s law.

Follow the BBC’s lead. If you’re not a fan of clickbait, the alternative is to do what web usability guru JakobNeilson advises and follow the Beeb. He claims BBC headlines have the following characteristics: Typically shorter than 6 words; Information-rich; Starts with keywords; Understandable even out of context, Matches reader expectations

MORE TOP TIPS FOR BETTER HEADLINES

HOW TO WRITE BETTER HEADLINES: Recap…

1. Learn from digital journalists

2. Take a position on click-bait

3. Take inspiration was online tabloids

4. Write for Google and humans

5. Experiment with different headlines and go with what works!

HOW TO WRITE BETTER HEADLINES: Further reading…

• http://www.theinternetworks.co.uk/2013/10/tips-creating-business-blog-content-boost-seo/

• http://www.theinternetworks.co.uk/2013/12/googles-hummingbird-algorithm-update-seo-social-tiw-jez-

booker/

• http://www.theinternetworks.co.uk/2014/05/create-content-seo-lessons/

• https://econsultancy.com/blog/63381-are-there-any-serious-lessons-to-be-learnt-from-mail-online-s-content-

strategy#i.1x2rmc9o9yezmq

• http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clickbait

• https://twitter.com/tiw_london

• http://www.linkedin.com/company/691623?trk=tyah

• https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TheInternetWorks/posts

• https://www.facebook.com/TheInternetWorks

www.theinternetworks.co.uk