Newspaper Headlines Bow To SEO Demands

prostoalex writes "News.com.com says the art of writing newspaper headlines is changing due to reliance on search engines for traffic to newspaper archives. Forget about clever puns, double entendres and witty analogies: 'News organizations that generate revenue from advertising are keenly aware of the problem and are using coding techniques and training journalists to rewrite the print headlines, thinking about what the story is about and being as clear as possible.' One big winner for now is Boston.com, The Boston Globe property, which 'had training sessions with copy editors and the night desk for the newspaper to enforce Web-optimized keyword-rich headlines suitable for search engine queries.'" Update: 10/30 14:1 GMT by KD : Corrected mis-attributed ownership: boston.com is owned by the Boston Globe, not the Boston Herald.

Re:Headlines?

[kongit]

Since search engines somewhat care about links to pages and most front pages of news sites have headlines as links to the stories, I would assume that headlines on news sites have some significance. Additionally, look at http://boston.com/ [boston.com] and count the number of headlines on the home page.

Re:What?!

[vic-traill]

Well, straight news headlines are one thing, I suppose. However, sportswriters are damned near defined by the puns that they do linguistic flips and twists to get into their headlines and stories.

I will confess that while I groan and turn my nose up like everyone else, I secretly admire headlines like 'Bull riders in chute-out tonight at the Corel' (from when Ottawa's Scotiabank Place - blech - was called the Corel Centre). It takes Glengarry Glen Ross-sized brass balls to put your name beside that teaser.

So, while I do appreciate the desirability of headlines that actually have something to do with the story, it would be a shame to see all headlines homogenized in a quest to improve SE rankings and thus eyeballs for advertising.

The Guardian is a perfect example of how a little guy can look real big on-line; while it is the second smallest national print newspaper in the U.K., it gets more than 7.5 million views per month, more than a quarter of those views going to readers in the U.S.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/business/1063229872.php [ojr.org]

Emily Bell - Editor in Chief of the Guardian Unlimited, which is what the on-line version is called - attributes the bulk of the Guardian's on-line success to the high volume of blog and Google links to Guardian articles, a result, she says, of *not* requiring registration to read the Guardian on-line.

Being informative and witty

[roskakori]

From the submitter:

Forget about clever puns, double entendres and witty analogies

It doesn't have to be this way. As a couter example, consider The Register [theregister.co.uk]: they typically use a main caption that is informative, and a smaller sub caption that attempts to be witty. Some quotes from their current front page:

• Vista encryption 'no threat' to computer forensics
  Who needs a backdoor when users leave the Windows open?
• Officials sued for $3m for disciplining MySpace spoofers
  Bloodied principal, muzzled students
• Internet users play tag with online content: study
  Folksonomies
• Romania: Software piracy made us what we are today
  Thank-you, Mr Gates

I could do without the clever parts though.