Whether you run a public website or a secure intranet, you’re likely to use headlines to get people moving around the site and clicking through to other sections or pages. There are several reasons why it’s worth spending a little thought on them.

• As a navigation aid, explaining what the reader can expect to find when they click on the headline
• To entice the reader to click through, and use the site to the maximum
• To improve the number of hits from search engines
• To retain the design and balance of the page

But it’s difficult to measure the effect of good headlines in a systematic way, and as a result the usability gurus offering tips don’t necessarily agree in every respect. Very often, then, your judgement is based on experience and gut feeling.

Having said that, here’s some advice from Jakob Nielsen that’s worth considering:

• Headlines should be written in plain language: no puns, no “cute” or “clever” headlines
• No teasers that try to entice people to click to find out what the story is about
• Skip leading articles like “the” and “a”
• Make the first word an important, information-carrying one

And from Poynter, some tips on writing effective blurbs:

• They’re an aid to navigation, but readers only skim them
• Blurbs encourage reading and scrolling on homepages, but don’t necessarily encourage clickthroughs
• People focus primarily on the left third of the text in blurbs – get the keywords in that area