Writing Effective Search Engine Friendly Headlines

Search Engine Optimization

Friday, 02 February 2007 12:03

Instead of simply being clever with a headline that does little to get your web page ranked by the search engines, why not combine solid headline-writing techniques with search engine optimization? This article shows you how to combine the two.

SEO Copywriting tip: Writing an effective headline

One of the biggest mistakes I see on web copy is the "clever headline" that has nothing to do with the topic of the web page. These are headlines like:

"It's not what you say that counts"
"I have a secret to tell you"
"Take it to the next level"

The intent of the writer is to invoke some sort of curiosity in the reader and to get him or her to read the next sentence. Of course we all know that the primary purpose of the headline is to get the reader to move to the subhead. And I'm sure you know that the purpose of the subhead is to get the reader to move to the first sentence of the body of the copy.

But what about the poor search engine? The search engines rank pages based on a number of factors (many of them secreted away in subterranean vaults at Google headquarters). Amongst those factors are the on-page and on-site optimization factors.

The on-page factors are the key phrases and keywords that you emphasize on the page to identify for the search engines the primary and/or secondary page topics. The on-site optimization factors are the keywords or key phrases that you emphasize throughout the site by using semantically-related key phrases on various pages, and strategically linking those pages together. Unfortunately , there isn't enough room here to go into the on-site optimization in detail.

However, on-page optimization is something you should consider when writing the headline of the page and the page copy.

First, determine the keyword or key phrase that is more relevant to the page. For example, let's say that the web page is mostly about pig races, and the web site is about creating a profitable corn maze business. Yes, these are real businesses, and one of the events they use at a corn maze to generate additional revenue is the pig race.

I only know this because a good friend is currently attending a corn maze conference, attended by farmers throughout the U.S.

So, let's pick a primary key phrase and a secondary key phrase. The primary would be "pig races," and the secondary would be "corn maze pig races." We then want to ensure that the title has the primary key phrase and the subtitle the secondary key phrase. In addition, you will include the primary key phrase (bolded, ideally) in the first paragraph of the copy, and both key phrases scattered a few times throughout the page. The number of times you mention the key phrases should be dictated more by the flow of the copy than by the "density" (ratio of total words to key phrase occurrences).

Furthermore, your headline will be in what's called in html coding an "H1 Tag," a phrase your web designer should know.

Now all you have to do is write your catchy headline with the primary key phrase "pig races" prominently displayed.

Here's an example of an Search Engine Friendly headline:

Pig Races Without Pigs?

Local Farmer Earns $5,324 in One Day Using Corn Maze Pig Races Without Using Pigs!

In the above example, the main headline would be an H1 header tag, and the subhead would be an H2 header tag.

If you were a farmer thinking about making some extra cash from your corn field, wouldn't that headline catch your attention? It would also catch the attention of the search engines for the primary AND secondary search phrases.

This one page might get a farmer to your web site, and if you've linked the pages together well with a good site structure, you'll keep them on the site longer, and maybe sell your special E-Book on how to earn money on pig races without using real pigs.

Rather corny, I admit but effective.