Writing good headlines for the Web is hard work. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen explains in a recent Alertbox post, successful online heads must be:
- short (because people don’t read much online);
- rich in information scent, clearly summarizing the target article;
- front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items);
- understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results); and
- predictable, so users know whether they’ll like the full article before they click (because people don’t return to sites that promise more than they deliver).
He identifies the BBC’s online news page as a consistent winner, with headlines like these from “Other Top Stories”:
Nielsen points out that the average headline consumes a mere 5 words and 34 characters. “The amount of meaning they squeezed into this brief space is incredible,” he says. “Every word works hard for its living.”
