A standfirst, also known as a “lede” or “intro,” is a short, introductory sentence or phrase that appears immediately before or after the headline of an article, blog post, or news story.
Its purpose is to give the reader a brief overview of the content of the article and to entice them to read further. The standfirst often provides additional information or context that is not included in the headline, and it is typically between 10 and 25 words in length.
For SEO (search engine optimisation), we would then re-use the ‘standfirst’ for the page’s meta description. The ‘headline’ will automatically be used in the page title, which Google will use, along with the description, when displaying your Google listing on a search result page.