A couple of nice points about writing headlines for the web from Martin Belam’s post on a talk by Guardian SEO Editorial Executive Chris Moran:
Chris addressed the issue of whether the SEO tail was wagging the editorial dog with humour, suggesting that if he was truly in charge, every story would be about Justin Beiber, with a headline starting “Justin Bieber”, a standfirst starting “Justin Bieber”…. That clearly isn’t happening.
Nor does he believe that SEO kills the art of the witty headline. On the contrary, a well crafted headline that works on the web should still stand out and be eye-catching enough to invite a click, just as a print headline should draw the eye to a story.
It is just that a different medium requires different rules.
You control the context of a headline appearing in print – you don’t on the web, where it might appear divorced from the whole article elsewhere on guardian.co.uk, on another site altogether, or in the search engine results of both site search and web search. You don’t need to put the name of the interviewee in a feature piece in print because the reader can see the photo and an attributed pullquote. In the digital world you simply can’t guarantee that they will always be viewed together.
A lot of the bad reputation for search engine optimisation comes from “black hat” activities, or as Chris prefers to call it, “naughty SEO”. It poisons discourse about it, and Chris showed a series of angry comments and letters to the editor accusing SEO of dumbing down the content of The Guardian. It isn’t just users who sometimes feel this way. As Chris put it:
“The words we use to describe the traffic that comes via search engines in the news industry are the words we use to describe sexual betrayal. Words like promiscuous and disloyal”
He made a point of reminding people that search requests do not arrive out of the ether. “Somebody, a human being, enters a query” he said.
All Evolving Newsroom
‘You control the context of a headline in print – you don’t on the web’
A couple of nice points about writing headlines for the web from Martin Belam’s post on a talk by Guardian SEO Editorial Executive Chris Moran:
Chris addressed the issue of whether the SEO tail was wagging the editorial dog with humour, suggesting that if he was truly in charge, every story would be about Justin Beiber, with a headline starting “Justin Bieber”, a standfirst starting “Justin Bieber”…. That clearly isn’t happening.
Nor does he believe that SEO kills the art of the witty headline. On the contrary, a well crafted headline that works on the web should still stand out and be eye-catching enough to invite a click, just as a print headline should draw the eye to a story.
It is just that a different medium requires different rules.
You control the context of a headline appearing in print – you don’t on the web, where it might appear divorced from the whole article elsewhere on guardian.co.uk, on another site altogether, or in the search engine results of both site search and web search. You don’t need to put the name of the interviewee in a feature piece in print because the reader can see the photo and an attributed pullquote. In the digital world you simply can’t guarantee that they will always be viewed together.
A lot of the bad reputation for search engine optimisation comes from “black hat” activities, or as Chris prefers to call it, “naughty SEO”. It poisons discourse about it, and Chris showed a series of angry comments and letters to the editor accusing SEO of dumbing down the content of The Guardian. It isn’t just users who sometimes feel this way. As Chris put it:
He made a point of reminding people that search requests do not arrive out of the ether. “Somebody, a human being, enters a query” he said.