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Journalists working for the BBC News website will now write two headlines on articles to optimise their copy for search engines.

A shorter headline of 31-33 characters will appear on the site's front page and mobile site, while a new longer title of up to 55 characters will appear on the story page and in search engine results.

The longer headlines will allow for more detail and feature more keywords to improve SEO for the articles.

"[T]he difference between a longer and shorter headline version might be as simple as: 'Queen's speech: Brown draws election battle lines" instead of 'Brown draws election battle lines'. Or 'Possible counter-bid for Cadbury' might become 'Ferrero and Hershey in possible counter-bid for Cadbury'," explained editor Steve Herrmann in a blog post .

The changes made by developers working on the site are a response to the growing importance of SEO, added Herrmann.

"A growing number of users come to stories on the BBC site from places other than our own front page - for example search engines, other sites, personal recommendations, Twitter or RSS feeds," he wrote. Last month it was reported that the Huffington Post applied A/B testing to its headlines , where different versions of headlines were shown to different readers. After five minutes the header with the most clicks becomes the permanent headline on the site.

'How to: write for the web'

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Written by

Laura Oliver
Laura Oliver
Laura Oliver is a freelance journalist, a contributor to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, co-founder of The Society of Freelance Journalists and the former editor of Journalism.co.uk (prior to it becoming JournalismUK)

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