The Free Website Project

Photo by everdred.

Everything you ever get noticed by will have a headline to go with it. Think about that, it means that even if you have a collection of photos, people will find it by searching for words in the title. It means that new visitors skimming your blog or forum will make judgments based solely on what people have called the posts, or the threads, or the website itself. Most importantly, though, it means that if you’re going to do well in any kind of media, you need to be writing killer headlines.

Now, I’m not the first person to discover this. Over the years, people have been refining their headline formulas and testing everything to see what grabs attention, draws readers, and sells products. Slowly, they have refined this art into something of a science, so that now you can buy tools like Glyphius and ScribeJuice to score your content and help you generate more interest through clever wordplay. Of course, being the free website blogger, I’m not interested in paying for anything, so I’ve been waiting for something that doesn’t cost a dime, and today I found it: the LAF Title Check by Dan Zarrella, a tool that used the Digg archive to score your most and least effective keywords on a percentage scale.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Digg, it’s a very popular social bookmarking site. That means that people submit things from all over the web, and the most popular rise to the front page through a visitor-controlled voting system. Those pages that do make it to the place of honor receive a deluge of traffic that can often cripple smaller websites with less powerful servers, but it’s all worth it for the fame and fortune that comes with “getting dugg". These copywriting tools exist to appeal to people, and Digg is a great place to see what appeals to people.

Is this tool really useful? Since I don’t have Glyphius, I decided to to the next best thing: test LAF scores against published results from real Glyphius headlines. The best list of these that I could find is here at The Copywriting Maven, where Roberta has clearly taken a lot of time to delve into the mysteries of using the software. Unfortunately, the LAF title check tool doesn’t recognize the word Glyphius, which really seems to throw off the results (most were below 0%). The only one that seemed to do well was “Glyphius Put to the Test And it Scored” with all the punctuation removed. This discrepancy suggests that there is still a lot of room to experiment with headlines, because different niches have different desires and expectations.

There is, of course, one more test that I can perform: trying out my own headlines. This seems to have brought me some interesting results, as you can see:

And the winner is…

As you can see, the word magnetic really made the results take off. Also, science and writing seem to be popular topics, so working them in doesn’t hurt. In the search for keywords, though, there is no shortage of surprises. For example, the ubiquitous “Ron Paul” got a score of -6.79%, probably because so many people have been trying to exploit the keyword to promote poor content.

If you’ve got a copy of any professional copywriting software and are willing, I’d love to see some more results compared with the LAF title check. Also, we’d all really like it if you could throw a few power words our way .