Titles and Headlines: It's Not a Newspaper
What's this? A whole article about titles and headlines? Well,
yes. Titles are some of the most vital parts of your site,
especially if it consists of a series of articles. Yet they're
also some of the most ignored elements of all web pages, and
more difficult than you'd think to do correctly. You have to
realise that you're not writing headlines - it's more
interactive than that.
Title Bar, History, Favorites and Searches
Everything you do with your web titles should be geared towards
these four places that the title can appear: that is, in a web
browser's title bar, history pane, and favorites menu, and in
search engine results. Never forget this. Sure, your titles
might look just fine on your main page, next to a picture, but
do they work out of context? It's even worth looking at the
titles in each of these places yourself (or doing a mockup of
it), just to see.
Be Concise, but Explain Everything
The thing those four places where titles can appear have in
common is this: they're separated from the context of the rest
of your page, and they're limited in space. Each one will cut
off over-long titles and replace it with an ellipsis ('...') -
not good if some important detail goes missing in the process.
What you need, then, is to be concise with your titles: ten
words is, effectively, an absolute maximum. However, what you
can't do is cut out words that tell the reader what to expect
from the article, moving them into a sub-heading or a picture
caption or something similar - this works in print, but on the
web the reader won't always be able to see those things. The
challenge, then, is to create a short headline that tells you
what the article is about even if you can't see any other part
of the page.
Useful Words First
In browser favorites and history, there's usually only room for
about three or four words, not for a whole title. That means
that you'd do well to put the most useful words of the title
first. Compare the following headlines:
Why Web Titles and Headlines are nothing like Newspaper Ones.
Titles and Headlines: It's Not a Newspaper.
What's the difference? Well, if you're looking at it in a
browser history view, the first one would probably read 'Why Web
Titles...', while the second would read as 'Titles and
Headlines...'. In effect, it's useful to have the first three or
four words of your title stand alone as a title themselves,
while elaborating in the title's second half. A colon or dash is
especially useful for this, which is why they're so much more
popular in web headlines than they are in print.
Keywords
When it comes to preparing titles for search engines, don't
underestimate the importance of the keywords in your title.
Search engines consider the title to be one of the most
important parts of your page, not to mention that it's often the
only part of your content that someone doing a search will see
entirely intact before they click-through. You want your titles
to be relevant to what your users are likely to be searching for.
What does that mean in practice? It doesn't mean that you should
make your site's main keywords show up in every title, leading
to string of titles all sharing the same two words: this is the
hallmark of a site that is trying to do nothing more than game
search engine rankings, and the search engines are wiser to it
than you'd think. What you should do instead is simply describe
clearly what the article is about as if you were searching for
that specific article.
If you've written a way of doing something, don't be afraid to
put 'how to' in the title (although not first: 'How to Write
Better Titles' is bad, 'Titles: How to Write them Better' is
good). If you've interviewed someone, put the word 'interview'
up there. For product comparisons, don't shy away from the word
'comparison'. This approach will get you search engine visitors
who really want to read your articles, and are more likely to
stay and read more instead of feeling conned into visiting your
site.