I might have used some link bait with that title. I don’t think Jim Dougherty, the author of this post, or I know the secret to writing the perfect headline. We simply bumble and hope that we write a better headline the next time.
Headlines are pretty important. More people will read your headline than will read your content. Some people will comment on your headline if your blog posts circulate in social media circles. But most importantly your headline is the reason that people will choose to read your writing or not.
For most people, this probably isn’t a huge revelation. But for me, it was.
Emotionally compelling headlines
When I first started blogging, I read someone’s advice to write emotionally-compelling headlines. A resource that they recommended was the American Marketing Institute’s headline evaluator. Armed only with that tool, I wrote headlines for many months using it as the judge and jury about the effectiveness of my headlines.
What was strange was that I wasn’t getting a lot of click-through. People that I know online have been extraordinarily kind with their attention and oftentimes gave me the benefit of the doubt, but when I look back I cringe at how irrelevant my headlines were to my content.
Det er ikke meget godt.
How headlines house hows
It wasn’t until a few people pointed out to me that my headlines weren’t accurately describing my content that I doubted the headline evaluator (In all fairness, in the hands of a better writer it is probably a solid tool.). In any case, because of a few considerate souls I understood that my headlines were muffling my content. Something had to change.
About this time I chanced upon an interview with Mike Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner. He described the basic philosophy behind his site. Cliff’s Notes version: he started by sharing his insights on writing compelling white papers and then decided that the biggest target market for his content were people interested in understanding how social media tools worked and how to become better at them. SME was born.
This made a lot of sense to me. All of a sudden, my site became the “how network” and it worked. Not only were my headlines more descriptive, but my traffic doubled in the first month of implementation. While there are a lot of variables that go into that, social sharing per post increased by about 30%. A well-crafted headline clearly communicates what content is there and draws the reader in.
All was right with the world until I benchmarked my site against similar sites. I saw that I was getting 5% of my traffic from search engines and similar sites were getting 20% or more. So I started thinking…
El pensamiento es el diablo…
SEO is the residual income of blogging, so…
I started digging into some tactics that I could use to increase referrals from search engines. My content was pretty good and my headlines were compelling enough for people to click, so what gives? As it turns out: a lot.
The quality of links to your site are pretty important so far as search engine ranking goes (the SEO world just sighed a collective “duh”). A site like mine that has 20K unique visitors a month may have some pull with Google, but without a lot of quality links even less trafficked sites could rank higher. That’s part of the game.
So an SEO strategy for a less established site (one with lower Page Rank) is to target keywords further down Google’s long tail (i.e. “Facebook’s distressing IPO” instead of “Facebook”) and to optimize each post for the keywords.
I was listening to a talk by Rand Fishkin on SEO where he showed that higher ranking posts used keywords at the beginning of each headline and the beginning of each post. The point was driven home even more by the exceptional Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress, a plug-in I recommend highly to anyone using the WP platform.
“How” was out and keywords were in…but now what?
Where is the sweet spot?
That leads me to where I am today. I can say with confidence that due to the extended social reach afforded me through Triberr, a compelling headline will get me far more traffic than an SEO-optimized headline. But they can’t be mutually exclusive, because 20% (or even 5%) is a big chunk of traffic.
The trick is to make a heading so compelling that people will want to read a post, and to make it so obvious (but not too obvious) that search engines think that people may want to read your content. You wouldn’t think the two would be so disparate, but they kind of are.
What do YOU think? What makes for a good headline? How do you appease people and machines? What’s most important to you?
Jim Dougherty is a blogger and chief of miscellany at Leaders West.
Photo: Peter Rukavina (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Erin Feldman
Erin Feldman is the founder of Write Right. She's a copywriter, editor, poet, and artist. She helps people tell their stories. You can find Erin on Google+.
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[...] Jim Dougherty on September 26, 2012 I recently wrote a post for Write Right Words bemoaning the difficulty of writing good copy and writing content that will be received well by search engines. It turns out that this [...]
[...] recently wrote a post for Write Right Words bemoaning the difficulty of writing good copy and writing content that will be received well by search engines. It turns out that this [...]