Back in April of last year, the New York Times published an article titled This Boring Headline Was Written For Google. In the article, Steve Lohr described how journalists would now have to start writing headlines that did not rely on metaphors, puns and other forms of worplay, as search engine spiders could not understand such things. Instead, simple, “boring” (his word) headlines would have to be used to ensure that articles could rank against relevant search terms. No more Gotcha, now it would have to be Argentinian Gunboat Belgrano Sunk. Journalists would have to learn SEO.
At the time, I thought that this was absolutely brilliant, as I was (and still am) in the process of trying to convince print journalists that there is a need to write content differently for the age of search. I still think this now, but with a rather different reason.
Lohr bases his article on the argument that if you want your articles to rank, then you need to have boring headlines. My addition to that argument would be that you should write simple, concise, informative headlines if you want people to click on them! Getting a story ranked by having a sub-headline designed for the engines (as Lohr describes) will do you no good if the link that the engines display is the clever wordy version. Most people won’t understand the clever headline when viewed outside the context of a newspaper / magazine spread (with accompanying pictures etc.)
Instead, the journalist should assume that the searcher does not have much knowledge on the subject. Thus, a simple and informative headline will make it much easier for them to decide whether the article that the search engine returns is actually relevant too them. And if, like the websites that I work on, the description tag is taken from the first sentence (and therefore generally shown as the snippet in Google and Yahoo!) it is also essential that this intro is simple, concise and makes clear exactly what the article is about and what information it will give the reader.
Essentially what we should be doing is avoiding any mention of SEO when talking to journalists; instead we should talk about the one thing that they are interested in – readers, and how to get more of them.
