Using headlines in empowering SEO

December 3, 2004

One of the least-known techniques in professional search engine optimization (SEO) and one of the most powerful is the use of headlines. For more than a century, newspapers have used them to their best advantage. The reason they are still using them today is simply because they work!

Headlines can have the same, attention-grabbing features in SEO. An added bonus is the ability to incorporate your important keywords and key phrases in them.

Headlines in any website will help both the search engines AND your users. If you think for one second your users don’t care if they read headlines or not, you are making a big mistake. What we call “juicy headlines” that are short and very descriptive give your website an advantage on the sites of your competitors in two very important ways.

The first is that headlines appear to separate your text and usually makes your page easier to read. Have you ever visited a website with a never-ending scrolling block of text? After a while, your poor eyes start to flicker and you look where the first exit is.

The second important advantage of headlines is that, research has proven that most people visiting websites today typically perform what we call “diagonal reads”. Very few people will read word-for-word on a site.

People today are always in a hurry and want to rapidly find what it is they are looking for. Analyze today’s major newspaper ads or the kind of ads you see in many “glossy” magazines: you will notice the majority of paragraphs have some kind of a “benefit headline”. Something like: "for only a few cents a day" or: “Imagine if this product was in YOUR office NOW", etc.

For many years, direct marketers have found that quick read headlines brings in the reader and “sets the bait” for some kind of sure sale. Added advantages to headlines are:

A: Your reader saves time and reads less
B: The headline informs him (or her) that the price is affordable
C: If the headline hints that it is readily available, your sale is made

One word of caution here: avoid personalizing any headlines on your site to any group of people or users in particular, as it would be too restrictive and would unnecessarily narrow down your market. If you really need to personalize to a certain degree and especially if you are conducting any kind of special marketing campaign, please refer to our article on Landing Pages which should help you better understand the right way to personalize any pages in a very effective way for your visiting public. Landing pages are the best solutions for cases like these.

Integrating your keywords into your headlines
Here is where the real fun starts! Headlines are great, as we have just explained in the above paragraphs. Now if you can just use the power that your keywords and key phrases have on your site and somehow find a clever way to integrate them into your headlines, your site will be a real winner in the search engine’s results pages!

Remember that your headline still needs to remain short and descriptive. It should never have more than one full line of text. If you can, place your headlines in H2 or H3 tags, since search engines will usually give you additional points for doing that. Here is a practical example that should help you do this the correct way:

Let’s say we have a website trying to promote “red widgets”. For sake of simplicity, let’s assume our identified keywords and key phrases are:

“Quality red widgets”, “Strong red widgets” and “Red steel widgets”.

First, always remember that the proper and ‘accurate’ way to identify what your real keywords are is with the help of industry-standard WordTracker. Optimizing a website for the wrong keywords will only bring in unwanted traffic that is untargeted and for products that you don’t even sell!

Using our 3 main keywords described here, you could make three headlines that would look something like this:

“Quality red widgets that will simplify your life”
“Red steel widgets are the industry’s strongest”
“Strong red widgets that will outlast any competing red widgets”

Note that we have placed all the keywords in the exact same order that WordTracker has sorted them from its database. These three headlines are a good example of how they can serve both your users, as they will rapidly know what the page is all about, and will provide the search engines with the right kind of keyword and key phrase information they need to better index your website in their database!

(Updated from my previous July 2002 article).

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2002

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