5 Ways to Ruin Great Writing with Poor Titles

Good writing isn’t enough to drive traffic to your posts. You need a strong title too. Titling can be tough to master, but it’s an important skill to acquire. Your title can make or break your article. It can take what you thought was a pretty ordinary post and help it go viral. Or it can turn readers off, so an excellent article never gets read.

Check your writing for signs of weak titles. Correcting these five common issues can help bolster your stats and bring in more writing income.

Your Title is Too Short or Too Long

It’s tough optimizing for both search engines and social media at the same time, but when we blog or write on social sites we are often trying to cover all the bases at once. We want our content to be noticed by search engines, but especially when we’re starting out with a new blog or writing for a startup it’s important to optimize for social sharing too. A lot of our external traffic is going to come from links we share to Facebook or Twitter, or links that our readers share on these sites.

Best length for your headline? Well, make it long enough that you can give your audience at least a clue what it’s about. But short enough that it won’t get cut off in search results or social media shares. Google cuts off at about 70 characters, so you want to aim for shorter than that. The Co-Schedule Headline Analyzer says the optimal headline length is 55 characters, or about 6 words.

Your Title Lacks Emotion

A good title triggers emotion. It uses words that trigger strong feelings, rouse curiosity, and communicate urgency. A good title intrigues and makes the reader angry enough to want to read the rest of the story. It hints at scandal or at potential riches, it offers a reward of some kind so people want to click through – a secret to success, something free, something exclusive. Jeff Goins even goes so far as to suggest making an audacious promise in your title.

Use question words – especially who and how. Use rich, descriptive words – not just strong nouns and verbs but also adjectives, and especially numbers. And the more urgency and emotion the words communicate, the better. 

Your Title is Vague

Now I don’t mean you have to go Old School on this and give everything away in your title. Headlines today are catchy, but they don’t always tell you exactly what to expect. Hubspot says the title should be “sexy.” It should be playful, bold. It might use a pun, a funny rhyme, or alliteration. And of course it’s great if it teases the reader!

So let’s look at a headline like, “My School Memories” – a short title that follows a pattern commonly seen on social writing sites. It’s pretty vague and it lacks any sort of emotional clues: we don’t know if these are good memories or bad ones. It’s also personal to the author, whom most potential readers aren’t likely to know. A title like this rates very poorly in the headline analyzer, and for good reasons.

Instead you could try a headline with more emotion – something like, “3 Things the Best Loved Teachers Have in Common,” or maybe even, “10 Most Scandalous Ways You Can Get Expelled.” Remember, you don’t have to say exactly what your post is about, but it’s got to leave the audience feeling they’ll be missing something if they don’t click through to read!

Your Title Contains Spelling or Grammar Errors

Question titles are great, but a lot of second-language speakers are used to a different word order when formulating a question. They might ask, “How Much Long My Title Should Be?” or “Why a Pregnant Woman Can’t Have X-Ray?” While a native English speaker will probably understand what you mean, a grammatically correct title is likely to do a better job of enticing readers to click through.

With native English speakers, a more common issue is spelling mistakes that may be missed by a spell checker, and that can change the meaning of the title. Instead of saying, “10 Coolest Desserts to Beat the Summer Heat,” imagine if you wrote, “10 Coolest Deserts to Beat the Summer Heat!” And of course a spelling mistake that creates an absolute nonsense word is even worse.

Be sure to proofread your title, even if you tend not to both proofreading your posts. If you aren’t sure it makes sense, ask a native English speaker to check it. Failing that, at least run it through a grammar and spell checker. Remember that your headline is like a handshake between you and your readers. You want it to be a good, firm handshake – not the touch of the limp fish! 

Your Title Doesn’t Match Your Post

My last caveat for bloggers is to be careful not to get carried away with the audacity of your headlines. They still have to be accurate, and they still have to match the body of your post. Search engines will penalize you if your title is purposely misleading. So never write a cheque with your title that your post can’t cash!

If you promise a post about making huge sums of money, you need to deliver. You can’t use title like, “5 Foolproof Financial Strategies for Fun and Profit,” and then write a post that asks the reader what he would do to achieve financial success. If you promise five strategies, there had better be five in your post. And they should be backed up with some sort of authority. A strong title demands that your post be equally strong, so don’t skimp on the writing just because you’ve come up with a really great headline.