How To Write Blog Headlines and Subheadings

Knowing how to write and format headlines and subheadings is an important skill for all CopyPress creatives. Both writers and editors are tested on their ability to format headings during the onboarding process.

Headlines and subheadings are important parts of blog content because they highlight the main elements of the topic, add to the scannability of the article, and lead the reader through the content.

Generally, there should be at least three subheadings within a 500-word blog article. 

Headlines and subheadings use a very similar formula and style. Both are best when they're 80 characters or less and capitalized in the following ways:

• Capitalize the first and last words
• Capitalize verbs and nouns (including "is" and "are")
• Do not capitalize articles, conjunctions, and prepositions unless they are four letters or longer

Here is a resource to help you properly capitalize headlines and subheadings.

Using keywords in headlines and subheadings is not a requirement, but it is a good practice since it helps search engines identify the content and shows readers the main idea of the article. 

Don’t ever force keywords into headlines and subheadings when it doesn’t make sense or sound natural. You should still use the keyword in the body of the content. You can incorporate stop words, which are words that don't affect SEO, to make the keyword sound natural. Stop words include articles, prepositions, and pronouns like:

• In
• To
• And
• The

For example, if the keyword you're writing about is "attractions Tampa," you could make your article title "9 Must-Visit Attractions in Tampa."

Here's an extended list of SEO stop words.

How To Format Subheadings

Unless otherwise specified in the Style Guide, subheadings should be formatted using the Heading 2 tag within the Paragraph Formatting icon in the Article Writing Window.

All subheadings should be formatted with the title tag hierarchy, meaning when you use a subheading within a subheading, it should be formatted with a smaller heading format. For most articles, you only need to use H2s, but if you need to further separate an H2 with a lot of content, you can use Heading 3s, followed by Heading 4s.

Here's an example: