Writing good headlines

Whether for blog posts or for other content which goes online, these four rules from the BBC’s news search optimisation team are pretty good:

1. use words that people would use in search in order to find the information being provided
2. avoid words that people would never use in search to find that content
3. put the most searchable elements at the front
4. proper names are often used in search, so – following rules 1 and 3 – names should be included in the headline and if appropriate at the front.

The full post has some nice detail on how following these rules means leaving behind some ingrained journalistic habits.

None of the rules, alas, cover camels.