Journalism Training Blog

Sounds like a boring headline, right? But for the Web, it’s fine. It tells you exactly what this post is about. Cleverness doesn’t count for Web headlines.

Gil Asakawa, manager of audience development for MediaNews Group Interactive, joined us Monday morning to talk to us about search engine optimization. All that means is making your story and headline something search engines like Google will notice.

Why Google’s attention is important:

• Most people don’t browse the Web. They go online and search for something.
• Most users never see a newspaper’s home page and won’t see stories in the order that editor’s choose.
• Traffic comes from search engines, news aggregators and social networking sites.

Google notices the title bar (that’s the set of words at the top of your browser window), the URL (the Web address), the headline and the lede of the story. Ideally, the words people are typing into search engines will show up in those places. Of those four things, the headline is the most important, and it’s also the easiest place to put those search engine-friendly words.

Tips for writing Web headlines:

• Write a headline that makes sense without the context of the story. The art head for a feature story will not work when standing alone on the Web.
• Avoid puns. Being straightforward is more important.
• Put the most important words at the beginning of the headline.
• Use names, not descriptions, for famous people. For example, “Schwarzenegger” is better than “governor.”
• If a person in the story is known widely by a certain description, use that. For example, early headlines on the birth of octuplets might have read, “Woman gives birth to eight children.” Later, after her name became well-known, “Nadya Suleman” could be used in a headline. After everyone starting calling her “Octomom,” that became a preferred headline word. Why? Because that’s how people would search online for a story about her.
• Use company names rather than descriptions.
• Use city names (or other geographical information). But don’t use city nicknames, like “Big Apple” for New York City. People don’t usually search that way. Some common city abbreviations are OK (e.g. NYC and LA). Also consider using locally known geographical names, like “East Bay.” If your readers (or those you’re trying to attract to your Web site) use it, that’s fine. It’s also good for building local readership, which in turn is good for attracting local online advertisers (those local advertisers don’t care how many views you get from across the country or from other countries).
• Use city names with sports teams.
• Use columnists’ names in headlines. (e.g. Newhouse: This headline is for a column)
• Wondering which keyword to use? Try typing your options into this search and see which one gets more hits.

Other considerations:

• Hard-news ledes do better than feature ledes. That doesn’t mean you can’t run a feature story on the Web. Just make sure you’re balancing your feature lede with a straightforward headline that uses keywords.
• Google searches the tops of stories, so the more keywords there are up there, the better your story will do.
• Stories that are posted first get picked up first, so it’s a good idea to file something quick and short, then update.
• When there’s enough news to merit it, file a new story. That gives you new a chance for Google recognition.
• More references to location get your story ranked higher.
• Post briefs and letters and separately rather than as packages. That way they’ll be indexed individually and have a better chance for higher rankings.

Videos and other multimedia:

• Search engines won’t see text embedded in Flash players. So have text and headlines independent of your videos.
• Search engines can read captions that are independent of photos, but they can’t read text that is embedded within graphics.
• Embedding a video in an article allows search engines to index the video.

Linking is good:

• Search engines give you more weight for incoming AND outgoing links.
• Linking to other sites is good.
• Use keywords in links rather than “click here.”