-
Website
http://www.louisgray.com/live/ -
Original page
http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/04/are-your-writing-your-headlines-for.html -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
Top Commenters
-
charlieanzman
61 comments · 11 points
-
Jesse Stay
221 comments · 71 points
-
ChangeForge | Ken Stewart
135 comments · 18 points
-
drewolanoff
64 comments · 55 points
-
Mona N.
118 comments · 17 points
-
-
Popular Threads
-
10 Top New Web Services of 2009 (From My Perspective)
1 hour ago · 1 comment
-
For All the Gloom Around RSS, Readers Continue to Climb in '09
2 days ago · 22 comments
-
Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Answer Incentives Problems
5 days ago · 33 comments
-
Mozzler Filters Your Social Stream for Links, Highlights Media
20 hours ago · 2 comments
-
iTunes, Sirius Seem Antiquated After Spotify iPhone Trial
6 days ago · 15 comments
-
10 Top New Web Services of 2009 (From My Perspective)
** i cannot guarantee that the title will make sense to a reader, just that it will be hawt!
We should write to be masters of our language, not our trends.
http://twitter.com/franswaa
Auto-posting blog posts to a Twitter stream is a horribly obnoxious practice, but that aside, it's simple enough to choose a different title to shoot to Twitter as compared to the real post's title. So why not do both?
Great headlines do that - 125 characters is a good contraint - In the UK one of the most memorable hedlines was 'Gotcha' (6 Characters) in the US my guess is many people will know the context of "Ladies and Gentlemen: We got him" (32 Characters)
The reference for the former is still on page one of Google, yet the headline was on Tuesday May 4th 1982. The latter quote is all over page one of Google but is much more recent.
The points made here a re good ones - keeping headlines punchy and short has a big advantage across the whole of the web and in the Societal Web in particular.
The bigger question in my mind is whether you're writing headlines to be noticed by search engines or by human beings. To me, writing for Twitter or other social media means trying to catch someone's attention by piquing their interest. SEO for search engines is also an attempt to stand out, but catching a search engine's attention involves different strategies.
Forbes too follows a similar approach - see http://twitter.com/ForbesTech
Google juice or twitter juice which one you rather have?
W
In being descriptive I find that I naturally include enough keywords for SEO, but I try not to overthink it - people first, bots 2nd.
I do use Twitterfeed to autotweet new posts, but as long as I include the most important words in the beginning of the headline I find that even the long ones truncate in such a way that they make sense on Twitter. As Ari mentions, when it comes to retweets, people will write their own descriptions, anyway, so I guess what matters most is that the headline makes sense when first delivered.
I think it's worth keeping Twitter in mind when writing headlines, but I wouldn't write for Twitter specifically.
Sachin