Print headlines don’t always work online

What comes to mind when you read the fol­low­ing headlines?

• Crime spree under investigation
• Access debate may not be over
• Snow plays havoc
• Area News Briefs
• BLM removes 3 miles of fence
• Laughter as med­i­cine, again

I’m think­ing that they leave you with more ques­tions than answers. Right?

These are six of the head­lines that appeared on the Chronicle’s Web page in the past few days. They are iden­ti­cal to the head­lines on the cor­re­spond­ing arti­cles that appeared in the printed ver­sion of the paper, and I’m will­ing to bet there wasn’t any con­fu­sion with those articles.

Why is that? Context. Headlines in the printed paper sit right above the pho­tos, text and other infor­ma­tion that make up the story. After spy­ing a short, non-descriptive head­line like these, your eye drifts down to the rest of the story and makes sense of it.

Readers on the Web, though, don’t have that lux­ury, for the most part. All the nicely laid out pages, pho­tos and text may be divorced from that head­line, a click away from the read­ers’ eyes. And unless those read­ers have a rea­son to click — or at least a head­line that tells them what to expect from the story — they won’t.

Take for exam­ple the infa­mous cover of the San Francisco Examiner from Sept. 12, 2001, right after the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In con­text, with that tremen­dous photo of the tow­ers burn­ing, the head­line makes sense. It’s evoca­tive. It’s a beau­ti­ful head­line — for a news­pa­per front page.

For the Web, though, it stinks. It’s just one word that has lit­tle to do with actu­ally hap­pened in New York City. When Google or any other search engine indexes that page, the machine doing the work isn’t going to know to con­nect that head­line with oth­ers describ­ing the attacks.

Elinor Mills at CNET wrote about this sub­ject in 2007 and had this to say:

Pithy, witty and provoca­tive head­lines — the pride of many an edi­tor — are often use­less and even coun­ter­pro­duc­tive in get­ting the Web page ranked high in search engines. A low rank­ing means lim­ited expo­sure and fewer readers.

Search engines drive people’s behav­ior online, and the part of a story they most often see first is the head­line. That head­line is a promise, writes Brian Clark. “It’s job is to clearly com­mu­ni­cate the ben­e­fit that you will deliver to the reader in exchange for their valu­able time.”

So how could we apply some of these ideas to the six head­lines I listed above? Consider the fol­low­ing suggestions.

• Bozeman police inves­ti­gat­ing a string of local thefts and crim­i­nal mis­chief complaints
• Gallatin County aban­dons three county roads, but debate over access rights may not be over
• Large snow storm downs trees, causes wrecks and plays gen­eral havoc on Bozeman area
• Bozeman area news in brief
• Bureau of Land Management removes three miles of fence near Ennis
• Bozeman group gets together for laugh­ter therapy

None of these head­lines are par­tic­u­larly witty, but they are descrip­tive. In all of them, I added some indi­ca­tion of the place the story deals with. You can see how I’ve expanded the detail level on all the others.

The impor­tant thing to remem­ber about writ­ing head­lines for the Web is that there are no space restric­tions. Do not abbre­vi­ate or use punc­tu­a­tion tricks to shorten the con­tent. Write it out so the machines index­ing our sites (and our read­ers) can make sense of them.

This entry is also posted on my other blog, Web Works.