Title case headlines are highly overrated

There are various misconceptions in the blogging world surrounding title cases these days and there are many who advocate putting all your headlines in title case (such as “How To Do Foo”) instead of sentence case (such as “How to do foo”). Some of them are:

• “It Looks Good”: The most commonly used argument is that title cases are somehow aesthetically pleasing or they look good to the eye. However, the “looks good” factor is obviously subjective, some may like it and others may not. In my opinion, they seem to be more readable initially but after a while, they get irritating. What also needs to be said here is that the h1 tag does its job remarkably well, and your site’s fonts and styling also have a much greater impact here than whether you use a title case headline or not. For example, there are display classes in Bootstrap framework (d-1, d-2, etc.) which make the letters even bolder and larger than normal h1 tags.

• “Good for SEO”: That they’re good for SEO is yet another baseless argument. Google not only keeps its search algorithm well hidden but also changes it from time to time, there is no way for us to know whether or not they consider title case headlines for page ranking. However, if you perform a casual analysis of what kind of search results typically come up on the first page of your search results, you’ll find a good mix of both title and sentence cases.

The important thing for readability is not a title case headline but maintaining consistency and that’s much easier to do with the sentence or proper casing. Writing title case headlines is difficult because there are no universally accepted rules to determine which words to capitalize. It’s generally accepted that nouns and adjectives must be capitalized but what about minor and commonly used terms like the, of, to, like, etc.? Should we always capitalize some of them and if so, which ones? APA might differ from MLA style for some classes of words, your own grammar school might say something else! With sentence casing, there is always a natural consistency and less confusion because you just capitalize the first letter of the sentence and proper nouns.

Finally, some people want to push the narrative that title case headlines are somehow the norm or what the “experts” do but that’s not true at all. The opinion is highly divided on this matter and this can be easily understood by performing a simple case study. The most authoritative blogs who’s works are usually trusted are those of reputed news agencies or circulating magazines. You can perform this case study for any topic you want, by doing a simple Google search for “Ukraine news”, for example, this is what turned up:

Only two news agencies (NDTV and News-18) have used title cases, all the others including Hindustan Times, India Today, The Hindu, etc. have all used sentence casing. Needless to say, these are highly reputed news agencies who’s reportage people trust in both mainstream and social media. And as you can see, both title and sentence casing can be observed across the industry.

And they follow this rule consistently too, most NDTV articles will have title case headlines and most India Today articles will follow sentence casing. With these examples, we can clearly see that there is no such norm that title casing should be followed at all times, and there is a good opinion divide between title and sentence casing. Personally, I prefer sentence casing because not only do the headlines look better (at least to me) but it’s also very easy to define and less confusing.