Writing and editing Titles and headings

Overview

Every piece of content that we produce should include useful and engaging titles and headings.

Use the following standards when writing your titles and headings to ensure our content is user-focused and optimised for search engines. For more information on how titles will appear in search results, see our Title tags guidance (opens in a new tab) 

This guidance applies to titles, headings, and subheadings in all our content, including:

• statistical articles
• methodologies
• digital content articles
• letters
• surveys
• email newsletters
• blog posts

Whether it is a statistical article, survey or blog post, the title is an important part of your content. It will be the first thing a user sees and should tell them what information they can expect to find on the page or within the content.

A title or heading should:

• be written in sentence case, apart from any proper nouns (opens in a new tab) 
• use plain language (opens in a new tab)  to describe the topic
• be descriptive
• be concise, preferably fewer than 60 characters
• be frontloaded with the most important information
• reflect the language of our users and the words they put into search engines for the topic

A title or heading should not:

• be excessively long, or it will cut off in the search results
• contain jargon or technical language
• include abbreviations or acronyms unless they are well-known, for example: UK, GDP, or EU

Examples

Statistical article titles

Methodology titles

Dataset titles

Capitalisation of titles

Only the following words in titles, subtitles, headings or subheadings should be capitalised:

• the first word
• proper nouns, such as names of countries, months, specific statistical time periods (for example, Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2021), organisations, and specific surveys and indices
• nouns when they are followed by numbers or letters, for example, Table 1 or Figure A

Example

Use title case for publication titles, such as Psychology Today and The New York Times. Do not use italics.

Read more about capitalisation in our nouns guidance (opens in a new tab) 

Narrative titles

Some statistical articles will also include a narrative title in addition to the statistical title, aimed at inquiring citizens or information forages. 

Example:

Narrative titles are only used in statistical articles and should not be used if there is no clear story to present. Read more in our Statistical article guidance.