This week the BBC announced that they are publishing two versions of their headlines – one for search engines and the other for readers.

This highlights how publishing has moved on and answers the question;  “What is the perfect headline?”  Answer:  “You need two of them to cover all bases.

Back in the day, headline writers were mostly bothered about space – and they still are if they are working on print publications.

Punchy, snappy, short – this is the style that most of the memorable newspaper headlines adopted.  Take the  Sun front page headline on the sinking of the Belgrano:  GOTCHA! Its boldness made it famous, but it would have baffled the search engines.

One of my favourite headlines of all time is from a report on an expected victory by Inverness Caledonian over Celtic: Super Cally Go Balistic Celtic Are Atrocious - it’s perfect…as a memorable headline, but less so as an search engine-friendly title.

Title tags are incredibly important to search engines, but they aren’t the only important part of the story as the keywords (and repetitions of) in the main body, category of news, tags, alt tags, links in etc. all play their part in the search engines reaching an understanding of the content.  Or not – see examples of Google News screw-ups.

So, unless you have a content management system that can deal with dual headlines, you’re best to aim for a couple of these options per headline.

Straight-forward, factual – using well-rehearsed keywords.  Thus, the Sun’s Gotcha would be “Falklands War:  Controversy over sinking of Belgrano”.

Be bold and controversial, but keep some keywords in.  “Bloggers revolt over scandalous Belgrano sinking”

Think, to hell with the search engines – and go with puns!

From a search engine perspective, ideally, keep your headline around 60 characters (for web listings)