How to write better titles for blog posts

If you’re interested in more traffic, you should check out this top ten list of tips from Poynter.org. Since they’re focused on journalism, they know a bit about how to write good headlines:

“Omit needless words,” said Strunk and White. If you apply that guideline to only one aspect of your writing, let that be headlines. In several of its potential destinations — Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — a headline that’s too long will have to be truncated to fit. Plus, shorter headlines are typically easier to parse.

In retrospect, we could easily have condensed the headline by changing from progressive to past tense in Berestein-Rojas’ post about Jose Antonio Vargas, referenced above. “Why a Pulitzer winner came out as undocumented” is just as good, and slightly tighter.

Read the full article here.