April 09, 2006
In a posting by Antony Mayfield he comments on an article in the New York Times that talks about editors are having to learn how to write headlines for search engines rather than people.
The various "bots" out there that crawl the web looking for certain words are now delivering around 30 percent of the traffic on many of the newspaper, magazine and television news Web sites.
"So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.
"In newspapers and magazines, for example, section titles and headlines are distilled nuggets of human brainwork, tapping context and culture. "Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, 'The heck with that,' " observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee."
Mayfield concludes with the thought that "search is the media", and that mainstream media is now seeing this and learning to be SEO specialists.
My thoughts, as always, are that SEO is just one part of the picture, and anyone that only uses that as their only strategy will not do as well as those using multiple means of drawing traffic.
At the same time, realizing that headlines, in and of themselves, are no longer the whole answer is healthy too. Headlines are for when you get people there, not to get them there in the first place.
