Subheads tell readers what content exists on a page and how different sections relate to the others. That guides readers to the copy they want to read and shows them how the parts fit together.

To make the most of your subheads’ ability to guide and instruct readers, make sure you:

1. Give equal emphasis to items of equal importance.

Give all “level one” headlines the same type treatment, and treat all “level two” subheads the same. That way, readers can determine the topic’s weight and hierarchy at a glance.

2. Contrast subheads from text, other display copy.

Make sure readers can’t mistake subheads for body copy, callouts or decks. To make the contrast clear, you might use:

• Font
• Type style
• Type size
• Color
• Alignment
• Graphic accents

3. Save the widows and orphans.

Don’t end a column or page with a subhead. Instead, make sure there are at least three lines of body copy before a column or page break.

4. Keep them short.

Don’t take the “micro” out of the microcontent: Limit subheads to one line. Longer, and they’ll start looking like text, not display copy. Then you’ll lose the attention-grabbing power of subheads.

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Barney Kilgore, the legendary editor of The Wall Street Journal, once wrote: “If I see ‘upcoming’ slip in[to] the paper again, I’ll be downcoming and someone will be outgoing.”

I’m with Barney: Stop ing-ing. Especially in headlines.

Now, to be fair, Kilgore’s comment refers to gerunds: verbs that get turned into nouns with the addition of an “-ing,” as in “Writing is fun.”

What I’m talking about are present participles, aka progressive verbs, as in “I am writing.”

Avoid present participling-noun headlines.

So who ever decided that “Present Participling Noun” was a clever headline? You’ve seen (maybe even written!) ing-ing headlines like these:

Hiring to Win

Taking Farming Further

Scaling the China Opportunity

Introducing A New App for Android

Committing to Our Ag & Turf Ambition

Introducing the Strategic Growth Incentive

Creating Meaningful Relationships at Work

Making dams safer for fish around the world

Announcing Our 2014 Scholarship Program Recipients

Transforming and Deepening Our Strategic Partnerships

Understanding Biofilm Roles in Reactions and Processes

Enabling better outcomes and lower costs through integration

Ending Child Trafficking through Collaboration, Awareness, and Support

So what’s wrong with “Introducing the Strategic Growth Incentive”?

Why avoid present participle headlines?

Ing-ing headlines like these:

• Focus on your actions instead of the reader’s needs. Instead of “Introducing A New App for Android,” how about “Get your job done in 12 minutes a week with new Android app”?
• Suck the subject out of the headline. We’re supposed to be writing about people doing things. Where are the actors in these headlines?
• Ing the action. The verb is the story. Ing-ing verbs are weaker.
• Just point to the noun. Instead of “Announcing Our 2014 Scholarship Program Recipients,” how about “2014 scholarship recipients headed to Harvard”?
• Take the benefits out of the headline. Which would you rather read: “Transforming and Deepening Our Strategic Partnerships”? Or “6 ways to jumpstart strategic partnerships”?
• Rarely get used by serious journalists. The New York Times, for instance, mostly avoids them.

Write like the Times.

We analyzed 99 headlines in the Dec. 15, 2014, edition of the Times. (We skipped the sports pages.) Of those, just four — about 4% — were ing-ing heads:

Stoking a Creative Spark

Stuart Shugg and Anna Azrieli in the DoublePlus Series

Stepping Back Into a Role’s Shoes

James Morris’s Unexpected Return to ‘Meistersinger’

Shaping a Shepherd of Catholics,
From Argentine Slums to the Vatican

‘The Great Reformer’: Austen Ivereigh on Pope Francis

Turning #IllRideWithYou Into Real-World Action in Australia

When you find these headlines in your own copy, rewrite. Make it subject, verb, object. Then you’ll wind up with verbs like:

• Stoke
• Step
• Shape
• Turn

Take a tip from the Times: Limit ing-ing drastically. Even better, stop ing-ing at all.

The post Stop it with the ing-ing headlines (Examples!) appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Your most important links are calls to action, writes HubSpot’s Kyle James. So how can you increase the chances that they’ll get clicked? Follow these five tips:

1. Avoid Fat Fingers/No Bars Syndrome.

Make “touch targets” at least 1cm × 1cm (0.4in × 0.4in) for mobile users.

2. Bold-face your most important links.

Visitors are 20% more likely to click on a bold-faced link, according to HubSpot research.

3. Go graphic.

Clickable images with text under them increased click-through rates by 100% in one Hubspot test.

4. Keep your call to action above the fold.

Visitors don’t always scroll.

5. Underline links and make them a different color.

Web users have learned to see underlined, colored text as links. Don’t make them learn a new approach for using your website.

“Users shouldn’t have to guess or scrub the page to find out where they can click,” writes usability expert Jakob Nielsen.

And if it’s not a link, don’t underline it. If you do, someone will click it. And that will confuse and irritate your visitors.

6. Make visited links a different color.

Reserve blue for unvisited links and use a clearly different, less saturated color for visited links, Nielsen suggests.

Some sites use gray for visited links, but Nielsen recommends that you avoid this practice. That’s because gray type is hard to read, and it’s often used online to show that something is unavailable.

7. Label links that do anything other than open a different webpage.

Let readers know if they’re opening a video or PDF by adding or [PDF] after the link.

Read Nielsen’s Guidelines for Visualizing Links and Link List Color on Intranets.
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Sources: Kyle James, “9 Ways to Optimize Your Links and Draw Attention to Your Calls to Action,” HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog, March 4, 2009

Jakob Nielsen, “Guidelines for Visualizing Links,” Nielsen Norman Group, May 10, 2004

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Think of links as the Goldilocks of microcontent: Some links are too long. Some links are too short. You want to write links that are just right.

Too long

Links are highly scannable. Blue underlined words stand out on a screen of black text on a white background.

But if everything stands out, nothing stands out. If your links are too long, your readers’ eyes may find nothing to land on.

The links in a PR e-zine, for instance, average 35 words. The longest tops out at 54. This one’s 32 words long:

That’s too long.

The solution: Link and bold-face the head; unlink and use plain text for the blurb. Like so:

That approach allows readers to scan headlines, then learn more from the blurb if they find something they like.

Too short

But if your links are too short, readers will have to read the copy around the link to understand what the link means.

Readers find this irritating. Plus, it slows them down, writes Jan H. Spyridakis, professor at the University of Washington College of Engineering.

MindHacks’ one-word links, for instance, are discombobulating. Who would click on article, acetylcholine, GABA, fentanyl, siege or BZ without knowing more?

They’re too short.

The solution: Rewrite sentences to create clusters of linkable words that give the context for the story. Instead of article, for instance, how about:

Or even:

Those five extra words add context, make the link clearer and the story more scannable — and may well increase clicks.

Just right

So how long should a link be?

‘Make links as short as you can and as long as you must.’ — Ann Wylie, writing coach
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Make them 7 to 11 words long (PDF), suggests Jared M. Spool, CEO and founding principal of User Interface Engineering.

His research shows that visitors find what they’re looking for more efficiently on sites with:

• Longer links or
• Links followed by descriptive sentences

Visitors were less successful on sites with super-short links.

So “link length is less important than a good link description,” writes Marieke McCloskey, a user experience specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. “Use as many words as you need to accurately describe the page … while still being concise.”

In other words, as with most writing, make the link as long as you must and as short as you can.

But do keep it under 54 words.
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Sources: Marieke McCloskey, “Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword,” Nielsen Norman Group, March 9, 2014

Jan H. Spyridakis, “Guidelines for Authoring Comprehensible Web pages and Evaluating Their Success” (PDF), Technical Communications, August 2000

Jared Spool, Tara Scanlon, Will Schroeder, Carolyn Snyder and Terri DeAngelo: Website usability: A designer’s guide (PDF). User Interface Engineering (North Andover, Mass.), 1997

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There’s a lot of sniveling and squawking going on in the web writing community these days. Consider the headlines:

• “This Boring Headline Is Written for Google,” grumble journalists.
• “Google doesn’t laugh,” moan headline writers.
• “Witty headlines: Black and white and dead all over,” kvetch communicators.

What’s all the bellyaching about? The fact that feature headlines don’t work so well online. Sad, but true: When it comes to web heads, it’s more important to optimize for search engines — and optimize for real people — than it is to be clever.

“Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines,” writes Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee. “And Google comes along and says, ‘The heck with that.’”

“If there is a choice between boring and useless, I suggest going for boring.”

— Steffen Fjaervik, contributing writer for Poynter Online

Or, as Steffen Fjaervik, contributing writer for Poynter Online, suggests:

“If there is a choice between boring and useless, I suggest going for boring.”

But maybe those aren’t the only options.

Four ways to write creative headlines for the web

Here are three ways to work around the SEO and scanning restrictions of web heads:

1. Use your title tag and URL.

Your title tag gets more Google juice than your web headline. So put your literal headline in the title tag and put the feature headline on the content page. The New York Times, for instance, sometimes packs keywords into its title tags, but not into the page headline.

2. Use the deck.

You could also use the headline for the literal story, the deck for the creative or benefits-focused one.

• Literal headline: [Topic word] does what
• Benefits-oriented deck: You benefit how
• Creative deck: Clever wordplay or twist of phrase

3. Be witty and clear.

You’re brilliant, right? Why not write a headline that’s both creative and telling? The pros are pulling it off by writing:

a. A literal kicker with a clever headline. Corporate communicator Kevin Allen writes:

“Witty headlines: Black and white and dead all over”

b. A clever kicker with a literal headline. “a book review headline in The Guardian was topped with this headline:

And some smart editor at NPR wrote:

c. A topic word subject with a clever verb phrase. “A Wired copyeditor writes:

And a Kansas City Business Journal writer comes up with

4. A reversed mullet.

Put the business in the front, party in the back with headlines like this one, from CNN:

No, there’s no danger that readers will injure themselves in a laughing fit, but these writers do manage to make their headlines both literal and creative.

How to manage all of these headlines

So how do you handle content management with all of these headline options?

Ask the writers to provide headlines and other display copy or microntent and metadata with the stories. Writers understand the story best, after all, and this approach keeps the webmaster from frantically repurposing everything and the end of the process.

And if you are publishing and posting, include the print headline in the web metadata. Print readers will look up the story using the headline they saw in the publication.

Even if it’s not the headline you post on the content or index pages, they should be able to find what they’re looking for.
___

Sources: Andy Bechtel, “Writing Headlines for Digital and Mobile Media,” Poynter News University, Dec. 5, 2013

Kevin Allen, “Witty headlines: Black and white and dead all over (because of SEO),” Ragan’s PR Daily, May 13, 2011

Amy Gahran, “Smart Headlines: Beyond Shovelware,” PoynterOnline, March 3, 2011

Arthur S. Brisbane, “Glimpses of Online Journalism, From Inside and Out,” The New York Times, Dec. 25, 2010

“Writing Online Headlines: SEO and Beyond,” Poynter News University

Eric Ulken, “Writing Headlines for the web 2010,” Poynter University NewsU web course

Eric Ulken, “This headline not written for Google,” OJR: The Online Journalism Review, Oct. 20, 2009

The post How to write killer headlines for web content appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Not everyone wants to play, “What’s the last word in the headline?” says Andy Bechtel, associate professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill.

So write web heads that don’t get truncated by Google, social media channels, mobile apps — or your reader’s attention.

How short? Make sure your web heads are short enough to:

1. Get seen on Google.

Google’s search results display only the first 63 characters of your headline. To avoid getting your head cut off on Google, keep headlines to 55 characters or fewer.

Remember: Google never bought a product, voted in an election or supported a cause. So write headlines for humans; optimize them for Google.

2. Get shared on social media.

How will your headline look when it shows up on Facebook, Twitter and other social sharing sites?

To avoid getting your head cut off on social media, aim for 55 characters or less.

3. Get seen on mobile devices.

Mobile apps and websites often truncate long headlines. To avoid getting your head cut off on mobile apps, follow the Associated Press’s guideline and limit headlines to fewer than 40 characters.

4. Reach readers on the go.

You have only a few seconds to reach mobile audiences before they swipe left or leave for another site. They want to scan at a glance, not study for a minute.

Plus, long headlines get lost below the fold or take up too much valuable real estate on mobile screens.

To avoid getting your head cut off, keep your web head to 8 words or fewer, or about 40 characters. That’s the length readers can understand at a glance, according to research by The American Press Institute.

But online, shorter’s better. My personal preference is web heads of 6 words or less, or about 30 characters.

Off with your head

Hey, all those extra words aren’t worth losing your head over. So when writing for mobile audiences, write headlines to go. Keep your head short.

___

Sources: Andy Bechtel, “Writing Headlines for Digital and Mobile Media,” Poynter News University, Dec. 5, 2013

Eric Ulken, “Writing Online Headlines: SEO and Beyond,” Poynter News University

Eric Ulken, “Writing Headlines for the web 2010,” Poynter News University, July 29, 2010

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There is one great thing about the inverted pyramid lead.

“The only benefit of the inverted pyramid lead was that it put a lot of valuable information high in the story,” write Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark, authors of Eyes On the News: The Poynter Institute Color Research.

But, they say, there is a workaround: “Some papers are learning to do that with more effective heads and deck[s].”

That’s right: Lift your key ideas off the page with display copy.

Six places to put your key messages

Garcia and Stark recommend that you embed your most important information in:

• A main head
• A deck to expand the head
• Color-coded summaries of the three parts or modules of the story
• Subheads and summaries at each module
• A numbering system where appropriate
• A closing box of more information

___

Source: Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark, Eyes On the News: The Poynter Institute Color Research, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1991

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