Kill Your Blog Headline Orphans

Orphans can make your headlines look awful. But you can get ride of them with one simple little piece of code and do away with orphans once and for all.

So, what are orphans? Orphans are a hanging, dangling word all by itself on the last line of your blog headline. They look atrocious and you’ll make your headlines look 100% better if your get ride of them. But how do you do that?

First, let me show you what an orphan looks like. Assume the sentence below is the title of a blog post:

This headline is designed to show you what an orphan looks
like

Not all lines in a blog post headline need to be equal length. You aren’t publishing a newspaper. But you don’t have to settle for orphans either. Now, you can rewrite a headline so that you don’t have orphans and that just requires taking away a word or adding new words so that you don’t end up with one word on a line. But what if you really love the headline you wrote and you don’t want to rewrite it? Well, just insert a line break tag in the middle of your headline where you want to break it up for the next line and that will kill your orphan. The line break tag looks like this:

< br >

but without the spaces.

Taking the above headline, you can kill the orphan – the word “like” in the second line – by inserting the br tag in the middle of the headline, like this:

This headline is designed to show you < br >what an orphan looks like
(remember, no spaces in the br tag)

If you do that then it will look like this:

This headline is designed to show you
what an orphan looks like

Much more attractive, right?

And, the best part is, you don’t have to mess with the optimization (you did write an optimized headline, didn’t you?). Now you know how to kill those little orphans.