Headlines matter (except this one, it sucks)
Article headline matters. Not just for the obvious reasons – getting attention, shock the reader etc. – but also from search engine ranking point of view. Creating catching headlines has been the art of newspaper editors since day one, but the change from offline to online has put even more pressure on creating article headlines. In some ways it has gotten more difficult. Not only does it have to convert the reader, but it also has to help the article to rise as high as possible for wanted keywords in search rankings (of course there are other factors that effect this too).
Social media has adds some extra spices to the soup as well. A good headline gets a lot more attraction for an article and can gain a lot of shares, retweets etc. (the content obviously plays a role as well…), which can be a major traffic driver. And speaking of social media, now that we have tackled the reader and search engines, twitter adds another challenge: 160 character limit. In case the original header is longer, might be wise to think of a shortened version for twitter as well.
I started to learn the importance of an article headline, when I first started working on SEO back in Agoda days, but it was only when I started writing, I realized how difficult it actually was to create a good headline.›› continue reading
