Headlines and title tags are important web page elements. Whether you’re talking about blog posts, static web pages, social media content, or something else, your headline has the potential to attract loads of traffic or to send it away to another corner of the Web. You hope you’ll attract the traffic, but to do that you need to understand some basic things about writing headlines.
Here are 5 things you should know about headlines before you start writing them.
  1. The headline’s job is to entice the reader to read your content. If it does that, then it’s done its job.
  2. Your headline should tell the reader what your content is about. Don’t mince words. Be specific and not misleading.
  3. A well-written headline online is optimized for both search engines and social media.
  4. A headline should be as long as necessary to get readers to click the link and read your content, but it shouldn’t be any longer than that. Shorter is better, but a short headline that doesn’t tell the reader what your content is about and that doesn’t entice the reader to read the article isn’t a good headline.
  5. A good headline has an emotional trigger. Readers are looking for benefits. Give your readers something to hold onto – a benefit – and then deliver on the headline’s promise.
Writing good headlines is an art. If you do it well, you’ll have lots of readers.