Key Difference Between Internet and Print Headlines

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Writing a good headline is simple, but not easy. In print literature, luring readers into the article is the overriding priority. But on the internet, luring readers isn’t the only thing. On the internet, your headline needs to attract the reader’s attention, AND attract search engine attention.

Attract reader’s attention

Attracting your reader’s attention is ground well-plowed by at least 80 years of marketing literature. Headlines must provide a reason why for people to continue reading.

This “reason why” could be some emotionally compelling claim, a promise to benefit the reader, words to induce curiosity, etc. John Caples in “Tested Advertising Methods” covers headline writing in the first several chapters. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

The serious student of the title will go further and get a copy of First Hundred Million by E Haldeman-Julius. This book was first published in 1929 and contains 10 years of publishing experience on the Little Blue Books. Little Blue Books were 3×5 inch volumes, sold only by mail, and only in lots of 20 at 5 cents each. Customers ordered by placing check marks next to titles on large, broadsheet inserts or pages in their local newspapers. The only difference to the customer… was the book title.

Little Blue Books lived and died by their titles alone.

That’s all well and good… but that was also before the days of search engines…

Attract Search engine attention

Titles have two roles in search engine results. The first is purely mechanical: does a properly specified title for a web page even exist? WordPress takes care of this issue automatically, we won’t discuss it further.

Given a title exists, the title heavily weighted in search engine results. You can demonstrate this to yourself by doing a search on the renown headline “How a Fool Stunt Made Me a Star Salesman.”

See how much bogus information is returned?

Disgusting, isn’t it.

A few days ago, while researching this whole series of articles on titles, my search turned up, as the top result on Google, a web page with just the title “How a Fool Stunt Made Me a Star Salesman.” Ads were packed in everywhere else. Total waste of bandwidth for everyone except the site owner, who is [was] very successfully gaming Google’s search algorithm. (I just checked: this result disappeared for me! Go Google!)

Since search engines can do at least matching between title and content based on keywords (and possibly semantic meaning), titles completely incongruent with articles are going to eventually get punished… even if the title is valid for attracting reader attention!

So you have to make a choice when you’re writing titles: do you please your reader, or do you write for high SERPs?

If possible, do both.

Satisfying readers… and search engines

Writing compelling titles or headlines for internet readership differs from print writing in one key aspect: your headline should reflect the content of the article to encourage better search results. In contrast, print media headlines really only need to attract the readers attention. As long as the reader is entertained, or benefits in some other way, having a headline that doesn’t mirror keywords in the content isn’t that important.

When you’re crafting titles, keep the following points in mind:

1. Search results are partly calculated according to the content of the article, and the title is a heavily weighted part of the content. For short term results, titles probably ought to contain one or more keywords.
2. From my experience, for high quality content sitting way out on the long tail (years in Google’s index), titles are much less important for SERPs. 1,2,3 word titles may rank very high with longevity.
3. Another part of the calculation is backlinking, which is an effect of having high readership. If your blog is widely read, you will get links pointing to your articles. If your article titles are just link bait and don’t reflect the content on the page, you’re going to piss off readers.
4. Use all the techniques from masters such as Caples and Julius-Haldeman to craft compelling titles inducing readers to “Click to continue,” and worry about the SEO content later. If you do what the “old masters” recommend… finding a title satisfying both readers and search engines will be easy.

You do know what the old masters recommend about crafting titles… right?

Tell me and get 30 minutes free WordPress or blog post writing consultation.

(Offer expires October 7, 2009) If you don’t know what they recommend, both authors hammer it repeatedly in the books given above. You can probably get both for $10 + shipping. Take action now. Get the books. You know it’s the right thing to do. Speedy implementation of good ideas is a characteristic of all successful entrepreneurs.

In truth, the readership-driven and the SEO-driven aspects of title creation are related, but my personal preference is to serve the reader over serving the search engine. In my experience with blog posts years old on There Is No Box, I get search results for really bad blog post titles (3, 2 or even 1 word titles!)… and people click through on them anyway.

Tagged as: Headlines, Reading, Titles