Punch line: Online, article headlines have to be descriptive and direct when they show up in mobile and RSS feeds … and they have to contain key words that play to search engine algorithms. It’s called ‘search engine optimization’.
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Excerpted from NYT: Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline, May 16, 2010
People who worry that Web headlines dumb down public discourse are probably right.
Headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative.
Now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. It’s called SEO — search engine optimization.
A story about whether the president would play golf with Rush Limbaugh might be headlined: “Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match and Says ‘He Can Play With Himself.’ ”
It would be a digital mega-hit: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the Web.
But the need to attract attention from computer-generated algorithms sometimes makes the headlines seem like a machine thought them up as well … it leads to a sameness that can make all the information seem as if it were generated by the same traffic-loving robot.
Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/business/media/17carr.html?ref=business
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