Effective headlines tell a story

Headlines and subheads are a great way to make large blocks of content more digestible for your readers. Plus, if you are writing web site content and want to make sure your content is as highly optimized as possible, headlines and subheads are a perfect way to boost your keyword density while also giving the reader visual breaks in the grey blobs of copy you're providing them.

Avoid label headlines because they are boring

The biggest mistake you can make with a headline is to make it boring. Think of a headline as an invitation to read on. The headline is like the subject line of an e-mail message. If it's boring, the reader stops there.

A label headline is one that contains no action at all, but merely offers a hint of what we're about to read. Let me give you an example.

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A lot of affiliates programs fail because the program did not provide coupons to affiliates who need them in order to successfully promote the campaign to customers.
This headline, while accurately introducing us to what we're about to read, is really dull.

Grab the reader by adding action to your headlines
Let's try the last example again. By adding an action verb, we will grab the reader's attention and make him or her more likely to keep reading.

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A lot of affiliates programs fail because the program did not provide coupons to affiliates who need them in order to successfully promote the campaign to customers.
Now the headline makes a statement. As a reader, I'm drawn to read on to find out why this is the case. The headline teases us and makes us want to read more. That is why label headlines fail.

Cutesy headlines fail to cut the mustard
I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to writing what I think are clever headlines. A few years ago I was so proud when I came up with "Crouching web site, hidden keywords" for a headline I wrote about black hat SEO practitioners who hide keywords in the background colors of their web pages in the hopes of gaining higher rankings. I suppose it's a fairly clever headline. Thanks to the nature of pop culture, however, it has a shelf life of about two years. And, worse still, it tells me nothing about what I'm about to read. A good headline should not only give the reader a clue about what they're about to read; it should also make the reader want to read it. That is why you cannot use cutesy or label headlines; they usually fail to do both of these key things.