Is there benefit to having longer article headlines?

[barberm]

I am seeing a trend in digital publishing on sites like HuffPo and others where they are increasing the length of article headlines to 3-4 rows of large type, often containing multiple sentences. Other publishers like CNN.com still have shorter headlines and character counts. Perhaps this is just a design aesthetic, but I am curious if there is any SEO value to having longer headlines assuming you are able to fit your targeted keywords/terms and message in something shorter?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I don't think there's a clear answer. Longer headlines are harder to share on some social media sites (especially twitter) and Google won't display much past 55-75 characters in search results.

But from a user engagement perspective, I bet Huffington post is finding some success with the longer headlines. This probably has as much to do with how they display the headlines on their site, and also how they distribute the content and share, so it doesn't mean this is a system that would work for everyone.

Best practice remains writing headlines between 55-75 characters.

But best practices were made to be broken

[BenjaminMorel]

I guess this is less of a question about SEO for HuffPost and others than about reader engagement - I'd be fascinated to see whether anybody who runs a news site or blog with a large number of page views (cough Moz cough) has data on this.

Going with my gut, I would say that longer headlines give the reader more of an idea about exactly what they're going to read, so they are probably more likely to engage with the post than if you used a shorter of headline. Of course, with bounces and other engagement metrics potentially being part of the search engine algorithms that might give you a bit of an SEO boost.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Great question, and I'm mostly responding to be included in other replies. When approaching longer titles for articles, we have used an H1 tag for a succinct 1-line title, followed by an H2 for the rest of the title. Regarding your design aesthetic note, I agree on two levels: 1) short titles look better and 2) are better for the visitor because they are easier to read. Also, stuffing lots of words into a title might look spammy.

I ran out to HuffingtonPost to see how they do it - their articles run 3 lines probably because of large font size which seems to be the trend these days, and also a fairly narrow site design with limited horizontal space. I think it works, but does make titles a bit rough on the eyes.