Home Page Headline
Every page starts with a Headline. Your "top-of-the-page" Headline is the first thing that humans will read on your Web page. Catch the attention of their scanning eyes. Draw your visitors into the rest of your page... and lead them to your links!
How do you create a Headline?
It's not complicated. Use your Description entry (that you entered earlier in "Page Information") and split it in two.
Use the first section (which is the most important part for the Search Engines and which must contain your Site Concept keyword) for the Headline. Then use the rest of your Description as the beginning of your Body copy's opening paragraph.
You may have to re-work the words a bit so that it all "hangs together" well.
A second way is to fire up your own creative juices and simply build an engaging Headline around your Specific Keyword (in this case, the Site Concept keyword).
- Enter the text for the Headline.
- Include your Specific Keyword once, not more than twice.
- Keep the text less than 80 characters, 40 is best. (Spaces count as characters.)
Example
Let's use the first technique and split this Description entry...
"One family's villa vacation experiences in beautiful, friendly Anguilla. Anguilla beaches are the best in the Caribbean, and Anguilla's warmth is surpassed only by its people's..."
Chopping and shuffling some words results in this Headline...
Vacation in Anguilla, Best Villas and Beaches!
The Headline contains the Specific Keyword, Anguilla, and some of the words from the first section of the Description.
The next example takes the second technique, the creative route. It still builds around the Specific Keyword (Anguilla)...
So What's YOUR Favorite
of All the Anguilla Beaches?
Let's take a closer look at this Headline (which is what the owner of anguilla-beaches.com actually uses on her site). It works on two levels...
1) For human visitors...
The Headline is compelling. Anguilla is known for its beautiful beaches. By asking for an opinion, it immediately engages the reader and makes her or him part of the discussion.
It leads into the opening paragraph of the body copy nicely...
"Favorite Anguilla beaches?" That's a question we were asked a lot.
You see, we had visited all 33 Anguilla beaches during the 30 days
we were first here (since then, we've been frequent visitors).
That's a great illustration of how to draw human readers into the rest of your page... and to your links!
2) For the Search Engines...
The Headline uses "Anguilla" (the Specific Keyword). Many engines give more weight to the keywords in your Headlines, especially your "top-of-the-page" Headline, than to your regular body copy.
SBI! puts your Headline into a special Search-Engine-friendly tag. And since these are the first words on the page, the SEs interpret them as being the most important copy on the page. Only the Title is more important.
It's 51 characters long, a bit longer than 40 but it is still acceptable.
Keep in mind that some Search Engines will not use your Description in their listings on their search results pages. Instead, they use the first 150-200 characters on your Web page to construct their own description in your listing. That means that they'll use your Headline plus the first sentence or two from your opening paragraph.
Tips
- Include your Specific Keyword once, not more than twice, in your Headline.
- Keep the Headline less than 80 characters, 40 is best. (A space counts as a character.)
- If your Headline is longer than one line, "break it" so that the two (or more) lines are about equal length, especially if you choose the "centered" alignment. Use the <br> HTML tag to insert a single line break (e.g., So What's YOUR Favorite<br>of All the Anguilla Beaches?).
- Use Title Case (i.e., capitalize words) to give your Headline more visual impact (e.g., The Best Beaches in the Caribbean).