Do Power Words Make a Headline Better?
Adding power words and emotional words to a headline raises its score in the Headline Analyzer almost every time, and past the first one or two it usually makes the headline worse. The score counts words from two short, fixed lists. It cannot tell whether "instantly" is true, whether "secrets" describes anything on the page, or whether a reader will feel misled when they arrive. This guide runs one headline through a series of edits, shows the score climbing as the headline degrades, and then sets out a more honest way to use the breakdown.
Every figure below was produced by the analyzer itself. If you paste the same headlines into the tool, you will get the same numbers, because it uses fixed word lists and fixed ranges with no randomness and no model behind it.
How the score is built
The analyzer adds five sub-scores, each worth up to 20 points:
- Length: 6 to 10 words earns 20; 4 to 12 earns 14; 3 words or 13 to 14 earns 8; anything else earns 3.
- Characters: 40 to 60 characters earns 20, with lower bands either side.
- Power words: words from a list of about fifty persuasion words (free, new, proven, guide, steps, how, why, you, your and so on). One match earns 12, two earn 16, three or more earn the full 20.
- Emotional words: words from a list of about forty feeling words (amazing, shocking, brilliant, irresistible and so on), scored the same way.
- Balance: the share of common function words (the, a, to, of, your and similar). Between 15% and 40% earns 20; between 10% and 50% earns 12; outside that, 5.
Two of those sub-scores reward vocabulary rather than meaning. That is where a higher score and a better headline part company. For a fuller tour of each sub-score, see what a headline score actually measures.
One headline, four edits
Start with a plain, accurate headline for an article that explains how to measure a title tag before publishing. Then make it "stronger" in the way score-chasing tends to push you.
| Headline | Score | Grade | Power words matched | Emotional words matched |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How to Check a Title Tag's Pixel Width Before You Publish | 70 | good | how, you | none |
| How to Check a Title Tag's Pixel Width: Quick, Easy Steps | 74 | good | how, quick, easy, steps | none |
| The Ultimate Guide to Checking Title Tag Pixel Width Fast | 80 | excellent | ultimate, guide, fast | none |
| Amazing Secrets to Check Title Tag Width Instantly, Free | 84 | excellent | secrets, instantly, free | amazing |
Read the four lines as a reader would. The first tells you exactly what the article does and when you would use it. The second swaps "before you publish" for "quick, easy steps", which is vaguer and promises an ease the article may not deliver. The third claims to be the ultimate guide to a task that takes one paste into a box. The fourth calls a width measurement a secret, calls it amazing, and adds "free", which says nothing about the content. Each edit gained points and lost information.
The fourth headline also loses on balance: only one of its nine words is a common word, a ratio of 0.11, so the balance sub-score drops from 20 to 12. The power and emotion gains more than cover it. The arithmetic simply favours more listed words.
The extreme cases show the limit
Push the lists harder and the score rises further, while the headline stops meaning anything:
| Headline | Score | Breakdown (length / characters / power / emotion / balance) |
|---|---|---|
| Shocking, Incredible, Amazing Free Secrets You Need Now | 92 | 20 / 20 / 20 / 20 / 12 |
| Brilliant, Stunning, Epic, Insane Headline Tips | 77 | 20 / 20 / 12 / 20 / 5 |
| you you you you you you | 53 | 20 / 8 / 20 / 0 / 5 |
| Title Tag Pixel Width | 27 | 14 / 8 / 0 / 0 / 5 |
The first line scores 92, graded excellent, and does not say what the article is about. The third repeats one word six times and still lands a "fair" 53, because "you" sits on the power list and six words is an ideal length. Meanwhile "Title Tag Pixel Width", a perfectly reasonable label for a reference page, scores 27. None of this is a fault in the arithmetic. It is a reminder that the score measures the shape and vocabulary of a line, not whether it is honest or useful.
Why a stuffed headline is worse, even if more people click it
There is no figure here for how many more people click a headline with "amazing" in it, and you should be wary of anyone who quotes one as a general rule. Whether a word helps depends on the audience, the topic, where the headline appears and what sits next to it. What can be said without data:
- Specific headlines set accurate expectations. A reader who clicks "How to Check a Title Tag's Pixel Width Before You Publish" gets what was promised. A reader who clicks "Amazing Secrets" and finds a measuring tool may feel the headline oversold it.
- Search engines show your title next to everyone else's. In a results page full of similar pages, the line that names the task tends to be the one that answers the query. Google may also rewrite a title link it judges unhelpful, which is one more reason to write the plain version yourself.
- Hype words get spent. If every headline on a site is "ultimate", "essential" and "proven", none of them carry any weight, and the site starts to read like an advert.
- Some listed words are claims. "Proven", "guaranteed" and "official" assert facts. Use them only when they are true and you can show it.
Where power words do earn their place
Several words on the power list are not hype at all. "How", "why", "guide", "steps", "checklist", "new" and "you" often describe the article plainly. The analyzer gives the same points for "how" as for "secrets", so the honest move is to let the useful ones in and leave the rest out.
| Headline | Score | Power words matched |
|---|---|---|
| Check a Title Tag's Pixel Width Before Publishing | 52 | none |
| How to Write a Meta Description That Fits on a Phone | 58 | how |
| Write a Meta Description for a Recipe Page in Five Steps | 66 | steps |
| Why Your Title Tag Gets Cut Off in Google | 76 | why, your |
All four are accurate. The last reaches "excellent" with no hype at all: nine words, 41 characters, two listed words that describe the article honestly, and a common-word share of 0.22. If you are writing a question the article answers, "why" and "how" are fair game. If the article is a numbered procedure, "steps" is a fair description. That is the kind of power word worth keeping.
A better way to use the breakdown
The score is most useful when you read the five sub-scores separately and only act on the ones that point at a real problem.
- Length and characters first. These describe something real: a two-word headline usually says too little, and a 14-word headline is hard to scan. If either sub-score is low, that is worth fixing.
- Balance second. A very low common-word share often means the headline has turned into a keyword list ("Title Tag Pixel Width Checker Free Tool"). A very high share often means filler. Either is worth a second look.
- Power and emotion last, and only if a word is true. If the article really is a step-by-step guide, say so. If nothing on the list describes it, leave those sub-scores at zero and accept the lower total.
- Compare drafts of the same headline, not different headlines. The score is a quick way to see what an edit changed. It is not a ranking of which article will do better.
Two practical checks sit alongside the score. Measure the headline in the Headline Pixel Counter if it will also be the title tag, because a 60-character headline can still run past the desktop width figure the tool uses (about 600 px, an observed working figure rather than a Google rule). And if the article has a shorter title tag than its on-page headline, our guide to writing an H1 and a title tag separately covers when that makes sense.
What the analyzer does not cover
- Truth. It cannot check that the headline matches the article.
- Your audience. A word that reads as friendly to one audience can read as spam to another. The lists are the same for everyone.
- Context and meaning. Words are matched one at a time. "Free" in "free of jargon" counts the same as "free" in "free download". "Not amazing" counts as an emotional word.
- Words missing from the lists. The power list has about fifty entries and the emotional list about forty. A vivid, accurate word that is not on either list earns nothing.
- Case and punctuation. "Why Your Title Tag Gets Cut Off in Google" and "Why your title tag gets cut off in Google" both score 76. If you are deciding between title case and sentence case, that is a style decision, covered in the Title Case Converter guides, not something the score can settle.
- Clicks, rankings or traffic. No score predicts any of these, and a high one is not a promise of any of them.
The short version
Write the plain, specific headline first. Run it through the analyzer and look at length, characters and balance. If a listed word honestly describes the article, keep it; if it only adds points, take it out. A 70 that tells the truth is a better headline than a 92 that tells the reader nothing.