Sometimes a headline needs to be serious: ‘Iran accuses journalist of spying’ and sometimes it needs to be fun: ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster. But in every case it needs to be good.
BBC News’ headlines are the best in the world according to web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen’s guidelines state that web headlines must be:
- Short
- Rich in information scent, clearly summarising the target article
- Front-loaded with the most important keywords
- Understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results);
- Predictable, so users know whether they’ll like the full article before they click
The BBC’s examples of ‘Italy buries first quake victims’ and ‘Iran accuses journalist of spying’ both pass the Web-usability test with flying colours.
Web headlines for web readers
The BBC’s has an advantage over newspaper rooted sites when it comes to crafting web-usable headlines.
Clever headlines that attract readers on the newsstands are not always search-engine friendly as they rarely contain keywords and proper nouns.
The first Google result for the classic Sun headline ‘Zip me up before you go-go’ is an article in the Independent about the return of the jump-suit – nothing to do with George Michael’s arrest for lewd behaviour.
‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ on the other hand fares rather well when put to the Google test.
Having your pun and Googling it
In February both the BBC and The Sun chose SEO friendly headlines when writing about China’s condemnation of Barack Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama.
The BBC went for ‘China anger at Dalai Lama-Obama meeting’.
The Sun opted for ‘Obama Lama ding dong’, proving that you don’t have to sacrifice a (bad) pun for your search-engine ranking.
Reader challenge
The challenge to Bad Language readers is to find:
- Brilliant headlines that pass the SEO test
- Headlines, such as ‘Missing baby found in Sandwich’, that remembered their keywords but forgot to proofread.
Add your nominations with a comment on this post.
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I came across the following cryptic offering on the BBC’s site:
“Midfielder coke makes owls switch”
No nominations yet, but wonderful post.
I always thought Nielsen’s writing very clear yet markedly unexciting.
I saw this headline on the NPR website: “Early
Obesity Doubles Lifetime Death Risk”. Since we all eventually die, I found this funny.
“Driving a positive customer experience across touch points”
There was a great cross-language collection of ambiguous headlines recently on the Economist’s Johnson blog.
A comment on an earlier post on the same blog quoted this fantastic WWII headline:
“British push bottles up Germans”
I find the English language far superior to, say, French and German, for producing short concise headlines, but that comes at a price: the reader often has to do a lot of grammatical parsing to find out which word is a noun is which one is a verb, as in the example above.
Famous Scottish newspaper headline: Super Cali Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious
Damn I wanted to say the Super Cally one.
Another good one, was Private Eye, on library strikes in Essex; “Book lack in Ongar”…
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