The all-important headline

It may be called a "topic" or "subject" on a blog. In news industry shorthand, it's called a "hed." Whatever you call it, it's the most important part of any article or blog post you write because it's the first thing a reader sees. An informative, eye-grabbing hed makes the reader want to look at the rest of the story. A boring or uninformative hed won't generate any interest in your work. I stress "informative" because a giant headline that screams "PRESIDENT BUSH CAUGHT IN THREE-WAY GAY MIDGET SEX ROMP" may grab a whole bunch of eyeballs, but if the article beneath that hed is about using embedded GNU/Linux in cable TV converter boxes, it isn't drawing in the readers for whom your article is intended. Indeed, in this particular case, "Using embedded GNU/Linux in cable TV converter boxes" is a perfectly good hed. It's a technical topic that will only interest a tiny percentage of all Internet users, and if you tell those users exactly what the article is about, they are going to read it even if your hed isn't very exciting. In fact, the only real improvement to the above hed would be to make it even more specific. "New embedded GNU/Linux distro is perfect for cable TV converter boxes" would be a better hed for an article about a new embedded Linux distro meant for cable conversion boxes. Another more specific hed -- if appropriate -- would be "How to build your own embedded GNU/Linux distro for cable TV converter boxes." These are all very long headlines by print standards, but on the WWW we don't typically have print-style space limits for either stories or headlines, so we might as well use all the words we need to say what we want to say. We still want to keep things brief, especially in heds, but there's no reason not to be as informative as we can be just to save a word or two. Note, too, that on many Web sites, including Linux.com, over half of the readers for a given article may find it through search engines instead of through the site's front page or RSS feed. This is especially true of "how to" articles that may be valuable to readers for many months (as opposed to news articles that may only be important for a few days). The more informative a hed you write, the more likely your article is to appear at or near the top of search results for people seeking the information in your article. I've been talking about informative heds, and about making them search engine-friendly. I haven't mentioned fun, even though I (like most long-time writers and editors) love to write funny, even punny, headlines. There is no reason not to mke your heds entertaining as well as informative. But conveying information is more important than being witty in a hed, especially on the WWW. Ideally, at least some of your heds will be both informative and entertaining, but if you have a choice between the two, informative must always win out if you want your articles to be taken seriously -- and to be read by as many people as possible.

very interesting. thanks

Yes, that means paying attention to meta tags, particularly meta "description".

ı know this now

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