David Politis

This was just one of the “loud and clear” messages that struck home in a recent training meeting with Business Wire’s Malcolm Atherton at the Politis Communications offices.

To be specific, news releases with headlines that are eight words long was deemed the ideal length.

Such length best for several reasons, Atherton explained.

1. Shorter headlines improve results in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
2. Shorter headlines have greater impact with readers as there is less to read.
3. Shorter headlines don’t get truncated in returned search results. (Both Google and Yahoo! only include the first 50 or so characters of a headline in the returned summary result; everything else is cut-off in the summary.)
4. Shorter headlines force writers to truly understand the thrust of a release, boiling the content down to the absolute essence — the core of what is needed — no more, no less.

Simple lesson then: When in doubt, shorter headlines are best for news releases.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:14 am and is filed under Betty Factor, Betty Factor, The, Influencers, Utah Technology, Internet Marketing, Investor Relations, Media Relations, Politis Pointers, Public Relations, Strategic Communications, Supporters, Utah Technology, The Betty Factor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.