Writing Titles and Subheadings

Why are titles and subheadings important?

• Page titles and subheadings are very important tools for you to engage with your intended audience
• A unique and descriptive page title will boost your ranking in search results
• People scan content online, rather than reading word for word. Since the title and subheadings stand out, use them to highlight what your page covers. If people can see at a glance that your page has the information they want, they’ll keep reading
• Thus, while a well-written title will hook them in to start reading, the subheadings will help people negotiate their way through the text and make it manageable to ‘digest’ by breaking it into chunks

Writing tips

• Your page title should distinguish your page from others on our website
• Keep titles and subheadings concise. For the title, limit yourself to 60 characters if you can – Google truncates titles that are longer
• Your titles/ subheadings should give a clear preview of what follows. While the titles should be engaging they shouldn’t be so 'creative' that the audience cannot quickly understand what the page/section is about
• Use words that your audience would use and are likely to be searching for. Where possible, get these at the start of the titles/subheadings
• Where it's appropriate to the content, writing a heading that poses a question is a good way to engage your audience
• Using phrase patterns with similar grammatical structures in subheadings of the same level can make it easier for your reader to grasp what you mean. This is called 'parallel structure' 

Here is an example where parallel structure is not followed:

Page title: Maintaining an Older Home

Subheadings:
Effective maintenance
Keep the building dry
Drawing up a maintenance plan
Maintenance inspections

Using a consistent parallel structure the subheadings could read:

Carry out effective maintenance
Keep the building dry
Draw up a maintenance plan
Use our maintenance inspection checklist

Or...

Carrying out effective maintenance
Keeping the building dry
Drawing up a maintenance plan
Using our maintenance inspection checklist.