Blogging tips are all over the Internet. Some are good, and many others are outdated. If you ask me, you don’t need to focus too much on SEO either. Just be yourself. Tell your story or share your knowledge with others. Search engines will always reward you for quality in the long run. That being said, how could you now write a killer headline?
Of course, clickbait titles pull a lot of traffic, but then, who wants to be successful at the cost of their ethics and who wants to be known for sensationalism? So what can you do? I say, try to summarize what your article is about in as few words as possible while still keeping it clear as to what the readers can expect from the post.
Elements of a great headline
Your headline should consist of the elemental pieces of what your article contains without giving away too much information. You could talk about the what, who, where, when, why, and even the how of some concept you’d like to share information about. You could also ask the reader a question which you elevate and answer as the body of your post. It also helps to include short facts or even numbers in the title. An example could be “Company X now makes use of product Z, productivity went up 25%” Okay, this is a bit long, but you can play with the details and shorten it perhaps to “How a company improved productivity with this solution.”
How can you analyze and improve your headline?
Okay, so you’re done now with your headline and think it rocks. But how to evaluate that before it gets published and the people go viral on you (or not)? When writing and editing articles for TechAcute, I always rely on a particular tool to capitalize my headline in the style I want to stay consistent in. This site is called Capitalize My Title. It very simple to use and works great, in my humble opinion. This tool now also lets you score your headline, and today I want to show you how you can do that in a few easy steps.
1. Open the site
Load up the Headline Analyzer.
2. Enter your title
Paste in the title (headline) you’ve chosen for your draft and click on the “analyze” button right next to the text field.
3. Get the results
Only a second later, you will already see the overall results from this free headline analyzer tool and can dig into the feedback they provide you with.
The results are spread into the three categories being readability, SEO, and sentiment. Green indicates you’re doing alright and are scored somewhere around 70 points or above. Based on how you performed, they even explain how the score came together and how you could possibly improve it.
The great thing about tools such as this is that they don’t cost you a thing, and after a while, you have a certain standard to adhere to. That means that you are automatically improving your headline writing and style, and after a while, you will no longer even get bad results on the tool.
Please keep in mind that news writing, personal correspondence, and business writing might not be a perfect fit for this tool, but if you’re blogging and want to improve, this should help you a lot. The score isn’t everything, but it can be a helpful “rule-of-thumb” for you to evaluate your ideas.
What else do they have?
During my research, I also stumbled over more interesting tools that they are offering. All of them work reasonably similar but serve a particular niche purpose.
- Email Subject Line Tester
- Fancy Text Generator
- Blog Topic and Title Generator
- Random Password Generator
- and a few more
I hope you found this post useful and I hope you have time to try all of these tools out. What headline would you have given this article? Can you beat my 74 without losing data too much? I’d love to hear your thoughts below in the comments. Thanks for reading!
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by Brooke Cagle. The website screenshots from Capitalize My Title are owned by them.
