Make Your Titles To the Point
Apr 10th, 2006 by Alex
I have a few thoughts about the recent New York Times article on headlines optimized for search engines.
I actually read the article, which is a rare thing since it was linked from Slashdot this morning. Okay, so I didn’t read the whole thing. I read most of it and skimmed the rest. I’ve got to be at work in thirty minutes.
The New York Times is not a small interest, nor is it primarily a blog vehicle. Despite all of their dedicated readership, I get the impression that those print editors and writers are irked that they’re having to rewrite their content to fit another business model. Print publications are trying to gain additional revenue from online advertising, a relatively new trend for them that was bound to require changes. So get over it! That’s what happens when you launch into a different business model than you’re accustomed to… you adapt.
The article mentions that clever headlines are used to draw readers in, and that plain titles are better for search engines. Web readers are a lot different than print readers. Witty titles aren’t going to suck in saavy web readers, nor will they suck in web readers that arrived at the article via a search engine. If a user wants to read about XYZ Corporation’s Buyout, and they arrived a New York Times article after querying Google for xyz corporation buyout, there’s no need to have a clever title to grab the reader’s attention… they’re already looking at what they want to look at.
I have no print copy. I have no extensive network of readers. Writing for a few small blogs, how do I benefit from search engine optimization (SEO)? For the most-part I don’t; spending large amounts of time optimizing my articles for maximum profits is not why I write. I write, in part, to contribute back to the community. My writing tends to technical, so it is a bit easier for me. If I write about a particular error I’ve experienced, I include the error message in the headline. It may be a hideous headline look at, but when the user queries for the entire error message (perhaps even in quotes) I rise quickly to the top of the results.
In my experience with search engines, I’ve found that a headline doesn’t have to be simple at all. My goal is to make the headline as close as possible to what a user is going to query a search engine for, which in theory should also match what you’re writing about. The bottom line is that the content should be more important than the headline. If your content isn’t interesting or useful, web readers won’t return, no matter how clever your headline is.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}