Phew! Talk about pressure. Writing a blog post about how to write a perfect blog post is the most meta of burdens. It’s a bit different than writing about perfect tweets or ideal Facebook posts. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re blogging about perfect blogging.

So I hope you’ll still trust the advice here even if you don’t find this post itself to be flawless. I’m sure we’d all love for each of our blog posts to be absolute perfection—however, it is that you measure perfection—so I researched all the necessary info to get us started on the path to perfection. I’ll cover headlines and length and visuals and so much more below.

How close are you to creating the perfect post already?

The seven essential elements of a perfect blog post

I can often get wrapped up in making sure that every little detail of a blog post is perfect. No doubt I could list way more than seven elements from perfect blog posts, but these seven seem to cover all the most important bases.

As you learn the craft of the perfect blog post, you'll be constantly reminded by us of the necessary elements of that perfect blog post. Here they are again:

And leading this list is the headline.

Eight out of 10 people will read your headline. Two out of 10 will read the rest of what you wrote.

Stats like this 80/20 rule from Copyblogger illuminate the fact that headlines are often the make-or-break moment for each and every blog post. So how do you make a headline great?

Readers tend to absorb the first three words of a headline and the last three words. These numbers via KISSmetrics come straight from usability research, revealing that we don’t just scan body copy—we scan headlines, too.

Of course, a few headlines will be six words long in total. In those cases, it’s important to make the first three words and the last three words stand out as much as possible. Here’s a sample of headlines from 99U with the absorbable six words highlighted.

In terms of SEO, the headline (or title tag) will need to be around 55 characters or fewer in order to fit the entire title on a search results page and avoid being abbreviated with an ellipse.

Google tells us that there are 1,400,000 results for the search phrase "writing the perfect blog headline". Hum, We were off by more than a million. We read Copyblogger a lot and their 80/20 rule reads like this: eight of 10 people will read your headline, and two of 10 people will read the actual blog post. Obviously, that information highlights the make-or-break moment whether they are reading your blog directly, or scanning the headlines on the front page of BoardingArea/Prior2Boarding. The key ... you need them to read your headline before they will read your post.

The perfect headline is a result of length and content, let's look at both. Research by KISSmetrics from a usability study indicates that readers tend to absorb the first three words of a headline and the last three words. Yes, they just don't scan your blog post, they scan the headline as well.

It’s important to make the first three words and the last three words stand out as much as possible. In terms of SEO, the headline needs to be around 55 characters or fewer in order to fit the entire title on a search results page and avoided being abbreviated with an ellipse.

On the website Bufferapp, author Courtney Seiter has researched some great strategies for the perfect headline and backed them all up with the power or nuance of psychology. Yes, writing a headline is a real science, and here are some of her findings:

There are countless tips and tricks for writing good headlines (some of our favorites are at Copyblogger) and we hope you'll spend some time researching your own style. Remember, It is often said that ninety percent of good writing is obsessing over the perfect headline.

Beyond the specific numbers, there is extensive advice on the techniques for writing a great headline. And I do mean extensive. At last check, there were 56 million results in a Google search for “how to write a great headline.” We enjoy pairing the workflow of headline writing with the science of human psychology. With that in mind, here are eight headline strategies that are backed by psychology.

You can also learn a lot from the headlines of high-traffic blogs. Lenka Istvanova developed a headline formula based on her analysis of best practices for headlines that get clicks. The formula goes like this:

Ex. 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier

We're fans of Neil Patel who is a co-founder of many services we use such as Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics. He created this infographic for writing great headlines.

Let’s look at the following. Here you have a listing of five hotel reviews.

Do you notice that the headlines for all five are different? For instance, in the first two, there is a reference to “Hotel Review”. That’s a good lead for the headline. But do you notice that one is in title case and the other is in all caps? It is always important to choose a style and stay with it. And the third one, the is in title case again but reversed to say “Review Hotel”. And then #4 which is yet another hotel review but it only states “REVIEW” and that is in all caps? And then finally the fifth one, all caps REVIEW again but it is led with #TBT?

Ideally, these reviews would all be led by the same phrase for consistency. This would help SEO which makes it easier for search engines to know what the content is. The actual review structure displays show that the author put a lot of effort into them. Just maybe a little more focus on the headline.

Here is a curated collection of headline-writing articles.

Coming out of BACON in September 2016, we had conversations with two bloggers who had seen some plateauing for their blogs in most of 2014. We suggested that they really should work on headlines and excerpts and each blogger would tell you that they saw immediate results. Here's the snapshot of those efforts, can you tell when BACON was? We can. Headlines made a huge and immediate difference for these two bloggers (in conjunction with excerpts.)

There are countless other tips and tricks for writing good headlines (some of my favorites are at Copyblogger). You might even feel paralysis by analysis. Keep up on the latest headline research. Make a good effort on your headline. Analyze and improve.

Ninety percent of good writing is obsessing over the perfect headline.

Next: Hook them in with good storytelling