Best Practices

Pack Your Headline With Keywords

What are the most eye-catching, searchable aspects of the story? What would someone Google to find this story? That’s what you need to get in the headline. You can also use Google Trends to compare search terms if you’re unsure which to use.

Frontload Your Headline

Get those keywords in the headline as early as possible. Most of our readers are coming to us from mobile. If they’re seeing a Patch email on their phone, we may only have 2-3 words to grab them, so they’ve got to be enough to get them to click.

Here’s a press release with less-than-enticing headline: “City Of Naperville: Naperville Police Investigate Shooting On City’s Northwest Side”

People MAY see “City of Naperville” on their device, that’s it.

Better: Man Shot In Chest In Naperville

Don’t Start Your Headline With What Police Are Doing

“Police Investigating/Make Arrest/Search For/Look Into.” That’s their job; that’s not the story. We would assume (and hopefully we’re right) that they’re doing their job. WHAT are they investigating? That’s the meat of the story, and that’s what your headline needs to be.

Example from an old SEO guide:

Not great: Police Make Arrest In Joliet Standoff; Gunman In Custody

Better: Joliet Shooting: Police Arrest Gunman

Other Words To Avoid In Headlines

• Incident: What was the incident? A shooting? A robbery? A crash? If we know what it is, use that word in the headline. For that matter, there’s no need to say “shooting incident” — just say shooting. Plus, that will leave you more characters to pack more keywords into the headline with our character limit.

• Accident: Don’t say “accident” in regard to a crash; say crash, collision, etc.

• Murder: Don’t call it a murder unless someone has been convicted. In a headline, call it a slaying, killing, death; say the person was killed, slain, fatally shot, etc. You can say someone was CHARGED WITH murder, but don’t call the crime a murder unless someone has been convicted.

• Allegedly: It doesn’t protect us from liability; just attribute accusations to police/prosecutors/feds.

• Death: “Passed away.” Say “died.”

• Question marks: if the answer is "yes," say what happened. If it's "no," then it's probably not a very good headline.

Customize URLs to Maximize SEO

As you've probably noticed, the web addresses of posts are generated by the first version of the headline upon initial posting — another reason why it is so important not to make spelling errors in headlines. Sometimes, it can be useful to post a first version of a story with a headline designed to get more keywords into a URL before updating with a new headline that might attract more clicks than search results.