Writing Heads & Titles
CNET's Elinor Mills notes that "Pithy, witty and provocative headlines--the pride of many an editor--are often useless and even counterproductive in getting the Web page ranked high in search engines" in Newspapers search for Web headline magic. Print headlines are routinely modified when stories are added to paper's websites, and many hed (journalism jargon: headline) writers now receive SEO (search engine optimization) training. The article is part of a series with many useful tips. Poynter's News U Access blog summarized fixes thus:* Use descriptive keywords in the headlineAnd John Foster of the Idaho Business Review describes in a comment how that paper went online and shot up in Google:
* Use similarly descriptive terms in the title tag
* Take advantage of online tools for suggesting alternatives: Google AdWords, WordTracker.com or KeywordDiscovery.com
On the web, the headline and subhed (critical for us was making both of them part of the URL) are really your old-school news lede. The descriptive, witty, engaging nut graph is now your lede. It's worked very well for us. Once a week or so we'll have the top story on a Google News hit, ahead of papers 100 times our size.There's no reason the rest of us publishers can't use the same techniques on our blogs and websites to gain Google juice for our productions.
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posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 9:26 AM
3 Comments:
I agree! Carefully choosing your headline can make a big difference with the search engines. I am not sure if this is "dumbing down" or simply taking advantage of the new way of communicating.
Hi Matt! Thanks for commenting. I think it is intelligently working with the system. Why not? After we've invested in creating a website or blog and the content, we want to be read. If most visitors arrive via search engines, we must make our work plainly obvious and attractive to the vehicle. This is an area in which "clever" and "cute" just don't work. Another challenge!
Thanks for your comment and liking the look
I find that once search engines begin to cache you, they pick everything up whether you want them to or not I do tend to write catchy headlines, but it's also the tagging that's important for initial pick up. Even how many people enter your site through Google
Feel sorry for the people who Google "hostile takeover" and find my blog. It was actually a hostile take over of my blog by somebody in blogshares that I just happened to find when looking at my sitemeter.
Thought it was funny so I blogged about it
The Google rank "6" depends on many things. I link to many people who have low page rankings because I like them--that helps keep me at a 5--many other things.
As a personal blogger who is only trying to sell myself, i find that page rank is less important than if people perceive you to be "influential."
Never really thought that I would be able to write theses on blogging--not that I am
The thing is once you're cached, any combination of words in the post is picked up by search engines.
The results can be hysterical, stupid, sick or great
So ultimately you end up with no control over the search engine listing.
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