How to Write a Great Online Headline.

There are three crucial elements that you have to consider in today's digital world of omnichannel marketing, and this is something many people overlook. Regardless of how good your headline is, if you don't apply these elements, then you might as well be shouting into an empty room.

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty, the subject of writing a great headline dates back a hundred years, and if you want to understand the fundamentals of constructing good headlines, the following three books are still relevant and great to have on hand. These three books should be in any professional marketer's library anyway, so if you don't have them yet, get them. They are Tested Advertising Methods, Scientific Advertising, and Ogilvy on Advertising.

Three Elements for Online Effectiveness

READABILITY

Readability is a pretty easy concept to grasp. In natural languages, the readability of text depends on the complexity of the vocabulary, syntax, and typographic presentation as measured with speed of perception, reflex blink, and fatigue. LOL, I'm having some fun with you. While that is true, the bottom line here is that readability is nothing more than how easy or hard it is for a reader to understand what you've written.

Readability is essential to your headline for several reasons but the two reasons you should be thinking about, and it pains me to write this. The average American adult has the attention span of eight seconds, and please sit down for this next one. The average American adult can comprehend text at a 7th to 9th-grade level.

Luckily for us, in 1948, a super-smart guy named Rudolph Flesch developed the Flesch Reading Ease formula, and the formula applies a numerical score to written text for you. While useful, it had some flaws, and in the mid-'70s, another super-smart guy Peter Kincaid updated the testing parameters and added a grade level to the score, thus the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score was born.

You can run your headlines through online tools such as Grammarly or Readable, and they'll provide this score to you. Aim for 60 or higher.

SEO

You want people to find your ads when they search online, so having a headline that is also SEO-friendly is essential. The five areas below make up the components of SEO for our purposes.

Word Count - Long headlines get cut off in Google search results, and short headlines don't give a reader enough information. Google prefers headlines that are 5-7 words long, so be brief.

Character Count - Within those 5-7 words, the number of characters can make a difference in SEO and clickthroughs. For Google, the sweet spot for clickthroughs is around 55. It is vital to remember that when you're developing content in an omnichannel environment, that you don't forget to consider the integrity of your messaging across your other mediums such as email (20), Twitter (71-100), Facebook (40), Google+ (60), and LinkedIn (80-120).

Pixel Width - While word count is a dependent of character count, the character count is a dependent of pixel width. I'll keep this brief. Some letters take up more room than others, think of I compared to W. The W requires more pixels to display than the I. Headlines larger than 600px risk truncation. Stay tuned for a solution below.

Power Words - Using power words creates emotion and curiosity, which is what will grab the reader's attention. They can also increase your clickthroughs and conversions. Here is a list of over 400 power words that you can use. You can also use them to impress your office-mates.

Keywords - We all know the importance of keywords. Make sure that you're using long-tail keywords and keywords that have high search volumes with low competition. If you're not sure where to start, KWfinder can help you out.

Title Tags - Last, but certainly not least, title tags are the second most important on-page SEO factor, after the web page content. A title tag, also known as SEO titles and meta title tags, is an element in the section of the HTML code of your web page that specifies its title on search engine results pages. If you would like to know more about title tags, here is a great article on How to Write Title Tags from DesignRush.

So now that you've mastered these five areas of headline SEO, you can use a tool like the one found at CoSchedule to run your optimized headline through to get a score on how you did.

SENTIMENT

Most people will be familiar with sentiment analysis as part of your social media monitoring tool, and how your tool uses NLP to score the opinion of your brand mentions is the same. Your consideration of the results, though, depends on your goal for the words in your headline. 

Headlines written with potent emotional triggers, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, can generate higher clickthrough rates for you. 

Using emotional words that are positive in your headline can increase the value of your headline. Using words that are negative in your headline, especially when they are strongly negative, can also generate higher clickthrough rates because they create strong reactions. 

Since this article is about writing great headlines for the web, I might suggest sticking to words with positive sentiment. It will support your SEO and the positive brand image I'm sure you want. You can find a simple sentiment tool to run your headline through at Sentigem. 

You are now equipped to tackle headlines with online smarts.

If you have trouble with any of the links or have a question for me. I can be reached at krm@kentmora.com

One last thing!

Remember, write directly to your audience because nobody cares if YOU like it. :)