15 Most Shared Words in Headlines & Titles

What are the best words to use in a headlines and titles? How many words should a title contain? What makes the best title? You may be surprised what science shows are the answers to these questions. Here’s how to create the best title based on scientific research of over 1 million articles.

Whether you’re writing a blog post or a thousand page book, the first few words are the most important.

“8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.”

–Brian Clark of Copyblogger

Just because most people get 2 clicks for every 10 people that read their titles, doesn’t mean you have to be satisfied with those results. By investing just a little time into your titles you can ensure that more than two people click out of every ten who read your title.

Upworthy, one of the fastest growing media sites is famous, or maybe infamous, for their eye grabbing titles. Upworthy’s co-founder Peter Koachley found that traffic directed to content on their website could vary by up to 500% based on the title.

So how can you make your titles perform like Upworthy’s?

Best 15 Words to use in Titles

I analyzed the 10,000 most shared articles for common words used in titles. I totaled up how many shares all of the 10,000 articles received over the past twelve months and ranked them based on the most shares.

I was able to find the 10,000 most shared articles by using BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo enables you to analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor with their social analytics tool. Below you will find the 15 most shared words in titles.

1. Numbers & Lists

Titles with numbers were by far the most shared with almost 2 billion shares of articles where titles included a number.

“10” is the most shared number with 26% of all articles shared that included a number in the title having the number “10”. Another interesting finding was that titles using the number “10” were shared eleven times more that articles using the word “ten”.

Noah Kegan did a similar study analyzing a million blog headlines and found that list posts using the number “10” were shared four times as much as the second most popular list type of “23”. In third and fourth place were 16 and 24.

Kegan’s study also found that list posts only made up 5% of the one million articles analyzed. Even though the power of the list post is common knowledge, content creators tend to shy away from using this tactic. The title does not change the quality of your content, it simply plays an important role in how many people will read your content.

Examples

10 Behaviors That Could Kill Your Career
10 Business Opportunities in Africa That Will Create More Millionaires in 2015
10 Reasons Why Agile Projects Fail

Take Away

Use list posts in titles often
When it makes sense, make your list a list of “10”
Use the actual number not the spelling of the number

2. You

Titles with the word “you” were the second most shared with slightly over a billion. We may not like to admit it, but we are self obsessed; the numbers don’t lie.

Examples

So You Resigned From Teaching. Now What?
Here’s What $8 Bucks a Month Could Get You On YouTube
Career Choices You Will Regret In 20 Years

Similar Word Ranking

1 Billion – You
500 million – I
300 million – Me
200 million – We
200 million – Us

Take Away

Use the word “you” in your titles when it makes sense

3. What

Titles with the word “what” were shared slightly over 650 million times. Titles with the word “what” combined with the word “is” made up 37% of those 650 million shares.

Shares by Word Combinations

37% What is
15% What do
13% What are
9% What did
8% What will
6% What does

Examples

What Are Some Steps To Keep Your Workers From Getting Ill This Winter?
What Is the Difference Between Digital Strategy and Digital Marketing Strategy?
What Did You Earn At Your Last Job?

Take Away

Use the phrase “what is” in titles often to attract attention to your post

4. Will

Titles with the word “will” were shared almost 500 million times. Titles with the word “will” combined with the word “make” made up 21% of those nearly 500 million shares.

Examples

26 Pictures Will Make You Re-Evaluate Your Entire Existence
24 Must-See Diagrams That Will Make Eating Healthy Super Easy
24 Pictures That Will Make You Feel Better About The World

Take Away

Use the phrase “will make” in titles often

5. How

Titles with the word “how” were shared slightly over 450 million times. Unsurprisingly, titles with the phrase “how to” made up 51% of those nearly 450 million shares.

Examples

How to Get 7.5 Mln YouTube Subscribers: Just Be You
How to Register a Node with a DSC Pull Server
How to Bid for Construction Work

Take Away

Use the phrase “how to” in titles often

6. New

Titles with the word “new” were shared slightly under 450 million times.

Examples

5 New Facebook Features and How Marketers Should Use Them
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Finds a New Way To Increase Income: Its Suppliers
New Research Discovers That Depression Is An Allergic Reaction To Inflammation

Take Away

Use the word “new” in titles often

7. Why

Titles with the word “why” were shared slightly over 300 million times.

Examples

The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things
Why Men And Women Think Differently. This Guy Nails It
Top 4 Reasons Why Good Employees Quit

Take Away

Use the word “why” in titles often

8. Best

Titles with the word “best” were shared slightly under 300 million times. Titles with the phrase “best (blank)” made up 89% of those nearly 300 million shares.

Shares by Word Combinations

89% Best (Blank)
54% The best
5% Best way
2% How best

Similar Word Ranking

300 million – Best
200 million – Top
100 million – Better
90 million – Fast(est)
80 million – Easy(iest)
60 million – Simple
60 million – Worst
20 million – Quick(est)

Examples

The 10 Best Markets for First-Time Homebuyers
Why Sales Is the Best First Job
10 Reasons the Best Employees LOVE Their Jobs

Take Away

Use the phrase “best (blank)” in titles often

9. Science

Titles with the word “science” were shared slightly under 300 million times.

Similar Word Ranking

300 million – Science
300 million – Data
30 million – Research
7 million – Stats
5 million – Statistics

Examples

How to Improve Your Social Media Ads Using Brain Science
The Science of Social Proof
The Science Behind What Content Goes Viral

Take Away

Use words that demonstrate a scientific approach in your titles often

10. Should

Titles with the word “should” were shared slightly over 200 million times. Titles with the words “should” and “you” made up 53% of those nearly 200 million shares.

Examples

The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things
The Top 5 Things You Should Never Do At Work
Why You Should Hire a French Person

Take Away

Use the words “should” and “you” in titles often

11. Know

Titles with the word “know” were shared slightly over 200 million times. Titles with the words “know” and “you” made up 68% of those nearly 200 million shares.

Examples

10 Things You Need To Know To Become A Great Leader
The Crazy Good Career Advice You Must Know Before the End of the Year
Five Things You Need to Know About the Future of Work

Take Away

Use the words “know” and “you” in titles often

12. Vs

Titles with the abbreviation “vs” were shared slightly under 200 million times. On the other hand, the fully spelled out word “versus” received less than ten million shares.

Examples

Marketing vs IT: Who Drives the Customer Experience?
Using Fiddler to Monitor Network Traffic from the vs Emulator for Android
Good Writing vs. Great Writing: Leading the Way

Take Away

Use the abbreviation “vs” in titles often
Do not spell out the full word

13. Never

Titles with the word “never” were shared slightly over 150 million times.

Examples

The One Thing Successful People Never Do
Why Successful People Never Bring Smartphones Into Meetings
The 5 Words Your Resume Should Never Use

Take Away

Use the word “never” in titles often

14. Free

People say that “free” is the most powerful word in selling. As titles go, “free” is the fourteenth most powerful word in selling. Titles with the word “free” were shared slightly over 150 million times.

Examples

FREE BOOKS: 100 Legal Sites to Download Literature
101 Free Things to Do with Kids in Michigan
40+ Free Apron Patterns & Tutorials

Take Away

Use the word “free” in titles often

15. Stop

Titles with the word “stop” were shared slightly over 150 million times.

Examples

Stop Fantasizing About the Perfect Job
Stop Using These Words In Your Emails!
Want to Hire Great People? Stop Asking Stupid Interview Questions!

Take Away

Use the word “stop” in titles when possible

Whether you’re writing a blog post or a thousand page book, the first few words are the most important.

Here’s how to create the best title based on scientific research of over 1 million articles.

How Many Words Should You Use in Titles?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a perfect answer to how many words you should use in a headline, but there are
some guidelines you can follow to increase your odds of success.

On average, people give a headline less than a second to grab their attention. Eye tracking studies from The Poynter Institute and user experience research from KISSmetrics show that people tend to scan headlines. When people scan headlines they only read the first three words of a headline, so you have to make sure those first three words instantly grab their attention if you want them to pay attention to the rest of the headline.

Interestingly enough, the research also found that if the first three words grab someone’s attention, their eyes tend to skip to the last three words, so you have to make sure those last three words close the deal and get people to consider clicking your headline.

The eye tracking studies and user experience could lead you to think that headlines should optimally be six words, but websites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy owe much of their success to the use of long titles that are on average 15 to 20 words long. Neuroscientists at Nielsen Neuro found that longer headlines drive more engagement. Specifically, they found that 21 to 28 word headlines drove the highest engagement.

If trying to optimize human behavior isn’t challenging enough, then you’re in luck, because you also need to consider constraints when choosing the length of your title. The first constraint is Twitter. Your headline should be 89 characters or less if you value clicks from Twitter. 89 characters leaves enough room to have a shortened URL and image in your tweet and a space between the URL and headline.

The next bar is Google. Your headline should be less than 55 characters to fit in Google search rankings. If your title is longer than 55 characters you should ensure that the first 55 are descriptive enough to motivate people to click or make the title tag different from the main headline. You can also make your titles different for each social media channel using different titles in the meta tags that are unique to each social media tool.

Take Away

The first 3 words are the most important
The last 3 words are the next most important
Longer titles drive the most engagement
Titles need to be 117 characters or less to fit in a Tweet
Titles need to be 55 characters or less to fit in a Tweet
You can create different titles for different channels

How to Write Titles

Writing great titles is like being a great NBA three-point shooter. You have to take a ton of pre-game practice shots to hit the game-winning three-pointer. Upworthy writers create 25 titles as fast as possible for each article they create. It was an exercise that originated from another news site known for attention grabbing headlines, The Onion.

The purpose isn’t to create 25 amazing titles; the purpose is to create the widest variations of a title. Adam Mordecai, Upworthy Editor-at-Large, says:

“The reason it’s always 25, no less, is that it forces you to think waaaay outside the box when writing. You get desperate around headline 21, and do something so out of left field that it’s not the typical headline.”

– Adam Mordecai, Upworthy Editor-at-Large

Advertising legend David Ogilvy rewrote one of his famous headlines for an automobile advertisement 104 times.

“At 60 miles an hour, the only thing you hear in the new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the dashboard clock …”

I like to use the Upworthy practice of quickly writing 25 headlines and then write up to 15 more making sure I have tried at least one variation using each the most shared title words. Below you can see 15 variations that could be used for this article:

What Are the Best Words You Can Use in Headlines?
15 Words That Will Make Your Headlines Better
How to Write the Best Headlines
Why Some Headlines Do Better Than others
The 15 Best Words You Can Use in Your Headlines
New Research Finds the 15 Best Words You Can Use in Headlines
The Science Behind Writing Headlines
Here Are the 15 Best Words for Titles that You Should Know
Best Headlines vs Worst Headlines
Never Forget These 15 Words for Headlines
15 Free Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing
Stop Leaving These 15 Words Out of Your Headlines

Then I like to choose the one that I feel will drive the most traffic and crank out at least 10 variations of that to see if there is an even better variation. In this example, I chose “How to Write the Best Headlines”.

While creating these variations, I use Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool and Buzzsumo to see how different variations of individual words perform. For example, you can see that I was originally using the word “headlines” in my titles for this article but then I saw that the word “titles” does much better.

“Headline generator” is the top Google keyword related to my article. Using the word “headline” generates 2,400 searches a month.

I compared that to the top Google keyword related to my article which was “title” and found that “title generator” received 14,800 searches a month. That is over six times as many searches for “title generator” than “headline generator”.

As you know, my article is not about title generators, but that is the highest ranking keyword that relates to this article. Lower ranking keywords showed the same trend, demonstrating that more related searches are done including the word “title” than “headline”.

I then did a similar search in BuzzSumo and found supporting trends for social shares. Hubspot had an article that included the word “titles” which got the most shares over the last twelve months at 14,900 shares.

On the other hand, the most shared article using the word “headlines” only received 2,700 shares. This article happens to be from Hubspot as well, so I felt pretty confident that I should use the word “titles” over “headlines”.

While the research provided in this section will help you create better titles, my hope is that it also inspires you to do you own research and testing to determine the best words and character count for your own audience.

But mostly I hope that it has inspired you to invest more time in titling your content. You invest too much time and energy in creating content to let it fall short of its full potential because you cut corners on the title!