There's nothing more scarce than attention. Use it wisely.

The ever-informative Eyetrack III studies have this to say about headlines and text on Web sites:

With a list of headlines on a homepage, we can see where people looked with eyetracking—and again, most often it's the left sides of the headlines. People typically scan down a list of headlines, and often don't view entire headlines. If the first words engage them, they seem likely to read on. On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention.

For headlines—especially longer ones—it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.

The same goes for blurbs—perhaps even more so. Our findings about blurbs suggest that not only should they be kept short, but the first couple of words need to grab the viewer's attention.

Public relations writing too often assumes the sole audience is the client and tries to jam too many ego-stroking elements into headlines and lead paragraphs.