Remember back in the day when you walked by a newsstand and were stopped by a headline on the front page? More than likely, you bought the paper to read the article. That’s how newspapers depended on sales – the sensationalism of their headlines.
That still holds true today, however, now more than ever this applies to your blog. There is content overload everywhere. You’re not just competing with your industry competitors for a social media user’s attention. You’re competing with the kids, grand kids, friends, family, other pages, and people they’ve liked, politics, breaking news, causes, etc., etc., etc. Moreover, you want your enticing heading to stand out in the search engine results page (SERP) — you want to get that click-through, which will lead to a conversion.
Elements of Good Headlines:
They…
are written for the human reader with the search engine in mind. It has to have the focus keyword of the article in it, yet, it’s main purpose is to entice the reader.
have the right number of words – not too long that it gets cut off in the SERP.
have to have the 4 types of words: Power, Emotional, Common and Uncommon.
What?!
OK, here’s a cool tool that will help you write awesome, powerful, enticing headlines.
Consequently, it will give you a score for your headline. Ideally, you want to get over 70. What’s more, it’s free and you can try rewording your headline until you get a high score. Sometimes inserting or removing a word or two will make the difference. However, don’t break your brain trying to get a 90 each time. Sometimes, just because of grammar, you’ll be in the 70s. As long as it makes sense to the human reader and it’s the topic of your article, go with it.
Also, it takes into consideration the type of words as well as how many, the reading level, skimmability, sentiment, clarity, etc.
Additionally, be wary of not sounding like click-bait. Too much sensationalism without the delivery in the article will hurt you in the long run.
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