Headline and Subheadline Mistakes…

Headlines and Subheadlines is an area that I see some online business do correctly but they still miss and important step to make the MOST out of them.

Let me first explain what headlines and subheadlines are. Headlines are found at the very top of the web page mostly on the opt-in and sales letter pages. They are generally a larger font size and almost always bold.

Subheadlines are found through out the sales page and should be slightly smaller than the header generally these are a different font color than the headline and bold as well.

My rule of them is to make the headlines 4 font sizes bigger than the body copy and the subheadline 2 sizes bigger than the body copy. For example if your body copy is 12 point type then I would make my headlines at least 16 point and the subheadlines 14 point. Sometimes I go a little larger on the headlines and subheadlines it is another aspect to test on your sales page.

A couple of things in the headline it’s self that gets overlooked is changing the color of action words in the headline and adding quotes to the headline. Let me explain what I mean. It’s been proven that the headline gets more conversion if you add “” at the beginning and end of the headline. This is a simple thing to do and it’swell worth it. The other is when you are creating your headline you will want to emphasize particullar action words in your headline.

For Example in the following Headline:

“Learn the Hidden Secrets to Writing
Award Winning Headlines by Using the Same
Strategies Top Internet Marketers Use!”

I would emphasize the following words. (Note on a web page this would be bold and the emphasis would be a different color.)

“Learn the Hidden Secrets to Writing
Award Winning Headlines by Using the Same
Strategies Top Internet Marketers Use!”

Generally if I bold two parts of a headline I try to make it where they make since if read together. As in this example the bolded text catches your eye and if you only read the bolded text it says “Hidden Secrets Top Internet Marketers Use”. If you only wanted to bold one section I would test bolding “Award Winning Headlines”.

Subheadlines are generally shorter so this practice would not apply but you need to take the same consideration with subheadlines that you would want to with the headline. Meaning, you want to make your headlines compelling enough to grab the visitor’sattention to get them to read the first line of the sales letter and so on.

The subheadline as you will find draws the attention for those that like to scan the sales letter for what is appealing to them. So you would want to avoid subheadlines that are too simple. For example I’ve seen this headline on several websites:

“Here’sWhy!”

Now how compelling is that? Here’swhy what? Yeah you might get some that is intrigued and would what to know what the “why” is. But why not up a keyword count for your webpage AND make this subheadling more appealing.

“Here’sWhy a Headline Swipe File is A No Brainer”

Isn’t that more compelling? Now wouldn’t you want to read more? Plus if your product is about headlines you’ve added more relevance to your keyword count.

The final mistake I wanted to mention with headlines and subheadlines is not using the right html tags. Yeah I know that sounds scary and technical but it really isn’t and makes a big difference in your search engine ratings.

Most times I’ve seen where people have just said the whole page as normal paragraphs and not designated the headlines differently. Here’swhat I mean:

If you were to look at the code view of many web pages you would see something like this:
<p>”Learn the Hidden Secrets to Writing
Award Winning Headlines by Using the Same
Strategies Top Internet Marketers Use!”</p>
<p> Hi welcome to my website I want to tell you about my product blah blah blah you get the point</p>
<p>”Here’sWhy a Headline Swipe File is A No Brainer”</p>
<p>More text explaining why you want to start a headline swipe file, blah blah blah</p>

What you see about is the simple html code for part of a sales page. The “<p>” tag is html to tell the browser that the following text is a paragraph and the “</p>” tells the browser that it is the end of that paragraph. This is well and good but nothing about tells the browser where the headlines or subheadlines are and believe it or not the search engines look for that.

Here is a “Good” example of how the above HTML should look.

<h1>”Learn the Hidden Secrets to Writing
Award Winning Headlines by Using the Same
Strategies Top Internet Marketers Use!”</h1>
<p> Hi welcome to my website I want to tell you about my product blah blah blah you get the point</p>
<h2>”Here’sWhy a Headline Swipe File is A No Brainer”</h2>
<p>More text explaining why you want to start a headline swipe file, blah blah blah</p>

You can see that I’ve added “<h1>” and “<h2>” to designate where the headline and subheadlines are, you can use additional “h” tags you can use but that is another discussion. By adding the appropriate “h” tags the search engines can quickly determine the importance of that text over the regular paragraph text and will make a big difference in your search engine ranking. Obviously you will only want to use the <h1> tag for the headline and the <h2> tag for each sub headline after.

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I wish you all the best and much success.

Frank Deardurff III – That One Web Guy!