This post about writing useful headlines for a local-news website started out last week as an email to my coworkers. They had all heard much of it before: “Headlines on the web work different. Labels don’t work. Place names are important.” This builds on those basics.
We don’t know where our online headlines will end up. Our article headlines are what the search engines use to figure out what we’re talking about. In print, you have all sorts of context. Online your context is not guaranteed. The headline is the most-often piece of linked text, which means it’s got to be able to stand by itself in the middle of nowhere dot com and still make sense.
With that in mind, here are some tips on making headlines work better on the web. The examples included are from the morning’s headlines on denverpost.com, and all of them have since been fixed (thanks, Demetria):
Use place names and people names as often as possible.
Labels like “city” and “state” should never be a headline’s only word used to describe location. Be specific. Column widths don’t control your pen like they did in the past.
- Example: “Growers cheer as rains put state totals near norm” works much better when it’s “Growers cheer as rains put Colorado totals near norm”
- Ex: “Police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” makes no sense on its own, “Montrose police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” helps a little more.
- Ex: “More farmers losing hope” could apply to farmers anywhere in the world. “More Colorado farmers losing hope” fixes that.
- Ex: “Justice not on city’s to-do list” could apply to any city. “Justice not on Denver’s to-do list” makes it clear which on we’re talking about.
- Ex: “Lottery a loser in current economy.” — “Colorado lottery a loser in current economy”
- Ex: “Star’s status does affect at-risk kids” — “Brandon Marshall’s star status does affect at-risk kids”
Abbreviations make sense to us, and the people who are familiar with us. They may not make sense to search engines, or the non-Denver Post lingo savvy.
- Example: ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Springs’ — ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Colorado Springs’ is much more explicit about the location, and that this happened in Colorado.
- Ex: ‘No doubt Nugs are for real’ is not hard to turn into ‘No doubt Nuggets are for real’
Puns are nonsense, and explicit trumps cutesy 95% of the time.
Here are some cutesy heds — try imagining if you saw those links on a list of headlines, and whether you have enough information about what’s on the other side of that click to consider making that click.
- Example: “High dudgeon — and other bits”
- Ex: “Hard slog on dimes and nickels”
- Ex: “Heart was dialed in on caring”
- Ex: “Forget that game, but not this team”
Watch out for label headlines.
If you have a label headline, often there’s a subhead, and often that subhead is what should be the headline online.
- Example: “Facebook time travel” — this one had a great subhead, “Old friends are new again using social networking — from the comfort of their own laptop”. There are a couple ways to approach this rewrite, and “Facebook time travel: Old friends are new again using social networking” gets the point across best.
- Ex: “Hoop Dreams” could have easily been “Hula Hoop Dreams: A rigorous workout with meditative benefits puts a new spin on an old toy”
If you’ve got any more resources about writing headlines for online, or suggestions, add ‘em in the comments below.
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Where do you come down on state names and abbreviations? I tend to build databases using post codes and full names, and it’s starting to make me hate AP style (Calif., W. Va) on states.
Good question — funny thing, I had a couple sentences about that in my first draft but eliminated them because I thought it was too small an issue.
It may not be. The challenge is figuring out the terms that people in your area use to find what they’re looking for. I know that people search for “Denver CO Weather” on Google about half as often as they search for “Denver Weather,” and that “Denver Colo Weather” isn’t even on the map. That would seem to make the two-letter (“zipcode”) state abbreviations more useful than AP’s.
But, still, search engines likely have internal dictionaries that map phrases like “Minn.” to “Minnesota.” It’s likely their parsers also can figure out that most references to “Wash.” mean “Washington state,” and aren’t the word “wash” arbitrarily capitalized with a random period after it.
In my day job I’ve been using the two-letter zipcode abbreviations some of the time, and the full state name other parts of the time. You can see some of this strategy in action on our weather news section (which I created mostly for SEO purposes): http://www.denverpost.com/weathernews .
All that said, I’d rather be in a S.D., S.C., R.I. or N.Y. than a Mich., Miss., Mass. or Ark.
I did a few test searches before I posted the comment, and Google at least has no trouble figuring out what AP abbreviations refer to which states. I figure most search engines are smart enough to figure out AP style. It’s better than I am at going from AP to postal and back than I am.
That said, I wonder if the issue is less about what Google can understand and more about what a user is likely to type. My quick tests were probably the first time I ever typed Calif into a search field.
I just did another couple tests, and Google, at least, recognizes this. Search for Jackson, Miss., and you get a map of Jackson, MS. Same with Missoula, MT, and Jackson, WY. Google normalizes to postal style.
Maybe I’m just getting irked by parts of AP style that feel dated and print-centric. Don’t get me started on “Web site” vs. website.
The “what readers actually type” is real, and it’s made even more real if a site gets more search engine juice from links with the postal abbreviation than it does from links with the AP abbreviation.
It doesn’t matter what you name something, if everyone else names it something different.
…a “Search Engine Friendly Stylebook” might be useful here.
I like it. Maybe we should start a wiki or something. Get some feedback how terms (beyond just places) are used in real life by real users. That would give us better data and better ammunition when random editors start insisting we all live in The City.