Headline Creation Quick Tips

Headlines are tricky – especially when writing for the Web. You want to be search engine friendly, but at the same time, you don't want to readers (or potential readers) to skim over the headline like it's part of a technical manual.

The point of a headline is to get everybody's attention: crawlers and people alike. While crawlers are easy to predict – the structure and timing are quite mechanical – people are in tons of different places with tons of different motivations.

Searchers are looking for something different in a title or headline than regular website visitors, who are browsing differently than the social network audience.

Writing for a spider is easy: Google Crawls Webpages

Simple, direct, clean. Subject, object, verb. Robots aren't impressed with your cleverness.