Headlines are the first things that people see when they come across an article or a video. It can be called a title in short stories or anecdotes. However, one thing remains true – they must catch the reader’s attention and capture their interest, enough for them to click and read through the rest of the article.

Business people who rely on click-throughs and views for income will find that content is still king. They need content to drive people to go to their website and click their products or view what they are offering. However, because people’s attention spans have shortened considerably, some of them only read the headlines and don’t bother reading the rest of the content. When this happens, you need to be very creative with how you craft your headlines and see to it that it is catchy enough to get people to actually click and read the rest of the article.

First of all, remember that headlines must be related to the actual content. In the past, there were some “click-baiting” activities wherein headlines were intentionally made to be misleading and controversial. It worked for a while but Google was immediately able to catch up and penalized sites which did this.

Today a good rule of thumb is to keep your headline to fewer than 20 words and to make it short and punchy and honest as well. To know tips on how to create attention-grabbing headlines, read the infographic below. You can also practice writing headlines and see how well you are crafting them by the number of people who go and read your content.