Introductory SEO for Journalists and Bloggers 1: Headings and Titles

Search Engine Optimisation – that’s ‘SEO’ for short – is perhaps the most vital and valuable skill  a journalist starting out in digital media today can learn. Good SEO practice improves your content’s ranking in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, making it easier for your readers to find and consume. With news and magazine sites still heavily dependent on advertising as their main source of revenue and traffic figures now one of the standard metrics for measuring the success or failure of an online endeavour, making your content as visible and user-friendly as possible to both search engines and human readers has never been more important.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to examine in detail how journalists (and bloggers, who without a big media brand name to fall back on are usually even more reliant on search engines to deliver traffic to their websites) can optimise their work to improve search engine rankings using simple, easy to follow steps. We’ll begin by working our way through a standard news article or blogpost, starting with the title and headline and gradually making our way down to the meta information your readers will never see. On the way we’ll take a look at how to make the most of your article’s web address, how to optimise your copy using keywords and how to correctly add links and spread the word about your content using strictly ethical means.

Just one quick word of warning before we plunge into our first topic – contrary to popular belief and the sworn testimony of thousands of quack ‘SEO Gurus’ around the world, Search Engine Optimisation is not a magic bullet solution. It does not guarantee an enormous increase in the number of hits your site receives or first page rankings on Google search. In fact, if performed incorrectly, it can actually reduce your site’s traffic or stop readers from finding your content altogether. With a little care, though, it can improve your chances of achieving highly placed rankings for carefully selected keywords and phrases which will ultimately produce tangible results.

Introduction

In this first article, we’ll be starting at the top of your post and examining how to write your headline, set your Page Title and correctly use headings for maximum possible search engine exposure. No knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP or any other web development language is required to follow this guide, though those with a grasp of the basics may find it easier to come to grips with the underlying principles of SEO. Below you’ll find a screenshot of a webpage containing a news article with each page element we’re going to discuss highlighted and labelled. Feel free to refer back to the screenshot if you feel lost at any point.

We will begin by discussing the first thing your readers will see when they click through to your article: The Headline.

Headlines

If the art of the headline writing is truly dying out, good SEO practice may well be the root cause. There’s no doubt that an expertly crafted headline still has the ability to amuse and engage but when it comes to writing with high search engine rankings in mind, utility wins out over a clever pun every time. “Up Yours, Delors” might have elicited a few xenophobic chuckles back in 1984 but in 2010 “Thatcher Set to Snub Delors Over Single Currency” or “Prime Minister Fundamentally Opposed to Federal Europe” will yield considerably better results from Google, Bing et al.

When writing headlines for your online news articles or blog posts, try to extract the key people, places, events and concepts from your copy – these will be the terms search engine users will most likely type into the search field –  and use them as the building blocks for a short and snappy sentence. Where possible, use simple, straightforward nouns rather than adjectives and unusual phrasings and avoid jargon – more people will search for “Paris Bomb Blast” than “Parisian Incendiary Explosion” and a headline containing the former will likely be placed more highly on Google’s results than one with the latter.  We’ll cover keywords in much more detail in the third article in this series when we looking at body text and SEO copywriting.

Title Tags

While we’re discussing headline titles, it’s worth considering Title Tags. In lay-person’s terms, a Title Tag is simply the text that displays in the title bar of your web browser when viewing a webpage – in this case, your article. The Title Tag is of critical importance because it’s the first thing the user sees after a search engine pulls up a page of results. A concise, informative title that summarises your article in one sentence is much more likely to be clicked on than an entry with a vague, muddled headline.

For those comfortable working with HTML, a title can be set using the <title> and </title> HTML tags but fortunately, most Content Management Systems (CMSs) automatically generate a title based on your headline and many allow the writer to edit it further. It’s usually best to edit the Title Tag yourself if the option is available to ensure that you’ve included enough relevant keywords from your body copy – after all, house style might limit your headline to just a few words but allow you a little more freedom with the page title. It’s worth remembering, however, that most search engines only register the first 60 characters of a Title Tag to prevent insalubrious keyword stuffing, so keep it fairly succinct.

Bloggers may want to consider using one the many SEO plugins available for the most popular blogging platforms to gain access to all title editing features. All-in-One SEO or SEO Ultimate are both excellent choices for Wordpress.

Heading Tags

Before we wrap up our discussion of headlines, lets take a look at enclosing them in Heading Tags. Headlines (and sub-headings, which we’ll come to next) are usually denoted as such in your text by putting them on a separate line and in a larger font, or by making them appear in bold or underlined. Just as text formatting draws the reader’s eye to a headline, clearly marking it as a separate entity from the main body copy, Heading Tags tell search engines that the text within is more important, in terms of navigation and structure at least, than what comes after.

All good CMSs will allow you to apply appropriate heading tags to the various headings in your copy. When manipulating HTML, this is just a matter of enclosing the text in <h*> and </h*> tags – <h1> and </h1> in the case of main headlines. Those not proficient with markup should ensure that they actually use their CMS’s text editor to properly style text as a headling rather than simply formatting it in bold and manipulating the font size. Only text in tags will be recognised properly by search engines (and by your browser, for that matter).

While many CMSs automatically create a <h1> tag based on your post’s title, bloggers using popular blogging platforms like Wordpress and Google’s Blogger may find that they need to create a separate headline at the top of their posts themselves. Whether or not this is necessary is entirely down to the theme your blog uses; some web designers have constructed their templates to automatically populate the <h1> tag while others have not. The best way to find out if your blog generates its own tagged headline is to view Page Source (Ctrl+U) and search the code for a <h1> tag. If it’s there and contains either your post title or a line of code that retrieves the title for you, all is well. If not, you’ll want to add one to your posts manually.

More on Headings

It is possible to modify Wordpress and Blogger themes to populate the headline tag automatically but unfortunately this requires getting your hands dirty with some basic HTML and PHP and that you host your own blog, rather than using Wordpress/Blogger.com hosting. Those who find manually applying headline tags to their blog posts extremely arduous might want to consider looking around for a stock template that supports the function automatically.

It’s also important to remember that when dealing with <h1> tags, only one should be used per post, so if your template does generate one on its own, under no circumstances create a second. While your blog likely won’t be penalised severely by search engines for having two <h1> tags, it’s best practice to keep it to just one and to use that tag for the post headline and nothing else.

A final – and somewhat confusing – point about heading tags. Exact tag usage varies from one website to another and while the system detailed above is the most common, used by the BBC, Guardian and Daily Mail news sites, there are other variations out there. CNN, for example, use <title> for the page title, <h1> as a container for the site logo and <h2> for the main headline (more on this tag in a moment). It’s usually best to check with your editor or tech team what the site’s headline convention is before getting started. If you’re a blogger and are managing your own website, you probably won’t need to worry about this much.

Subheadings

Correctly marking up your subheadings is also very important, not only for making your article easier to navigate for your readers but for drawing a search engine’s attention to important subsections of the text.  All of the same rules you used when writing your headline also apply to crafting subheadings; keep it brief, use keywords that crop up in your text and avoid the temptation to sacrifice clarity and utility for the sake of a delicious pun. You’ll also need to apply heading tags to ensure that search engines recognise sub-headings, although unfortunately in this case there’s no chance of the CMS looking after it for you automatically.

When tagging your subheadings, you’ll be applying styles like Heading 2, Heading 3 etc, all the way down to Heading 6 (where Heading 1, as your main headline, is the most important, and Heading 6 the least). In HTML these styles represent the <h2> to <h6> tags and these enclose your sub-headings in exactly the same way as the <h1> tag contained your headline. As a general rule, you should structure your sub-headings hierarchically, Heading 2/<h2> for your main sub-headings, Heading 3/<h3> for sub-headings nested under those and Heading 4/<h4> for sub-headings of Heading 3 and so on. It’s unlikely you’ll ever make it down to Heading 6 in an article or blog post but if you do, the rules remain the same. Unlike <h1> tags, you are encouraged to make use of multiple <h2> etc tags to clearly denote your subsections and, indeed, its best practice to do so..

See the diagram above for a more visual demonstration of this principle.

Checklist

Correctly writing headlines and subheadings, setting a suitable Page Title and applying heading tags to your text where appropriate are some of the most fundamental techniques for optimising your articles or blog posts for search engines. They are straightforward tasks that can be performed by anyone reasonably familiar with a WYSIWYG text editor; if you’ve managed to publish a blog post in the past you’ll certainly have no trouble in assimilating them into your posting routine. I’ve created creating a step-by-step SEO checklist to help you ensure that all necessary SEO tasks have been performed before you publish your article. As the series goes on, I’ll gradually add more steps to the list as we discuss different aspects of the SEO process.

1. Is your Headline written in an SEO-friendly style and enclosed in a <h1> tag somewhere on the page?
2. Is your Page Title written in an SEO-friendly style and enclosed in a <title> tag or entered into a Page Title field?
3. Are your Subheadings written in an SEO-friendly style and enclosed in the appropriate heading tag?

Final Thoughts

While Search Engine Optimisation is a valuable skill and something all journalists and bloggers should be avid evangelists of, let’s spare a moment’s thought for the fine art of headline writing. There’s a belief that good SEO practice is killing the ancient tradition of pun-based headlines and while there’s some truth in this, it’s simply not the case that writing with search engine results in mind always comes down to sacrificing creativity for utility. There remain plenty of opportunities for wordplay in excerpts, straplines and picture captions, where they remain easily visible to readers without diluting your content’s indexing potential. Headline writers are a resilient bunch and no matter how powerful search algorithms become, there will always be room for both witty double-entendres and mind-numbingly awful puns in the digital world.

Further Reading

Econsultancy – A Journalist’s Guide to SEO

Wordstream – SEO Title Tag Formulas: How To Create High Performance Title Tags

SEO Book – How to Craft Kick-Ass Headline Tags and Titles

The Guardian – Search for the Perfect Headline

In Part 2, we’ll be looking at Permalink Structures and URLs and discovering how you can use a page’s web address to maximise your content’s SEO potential.