By Greg Jarboe
Although I'm a press release optimization expert, I'm also a former award-winning newspaper editor. So, I confess to sneaking a peak on occasion at an old fashioned news headline in The New York Times print edition.
On Sunday, April 9, 2006, I saw something that hit me like a pie in the face. It was an article by Steve Lohr entitled, "This Boring Headline Is Written for Google."
Ironically, this headline wasn't optimized by the editors of The New York Times newspaper. According to Keyword Discovery, the most comprehensive keyword research tool I've used, people don't search for the phrase, "boring headline." At least, this two-word phrase doesn't appear in its database, which spans over 32 billion searches collected over the last 12 months.
"Google," on the other hand, is a very popular search term. According to Keyword Discovery, there were 29,952,402 searches for "Google" in the last 12 months. However, it's pretty hard to get high search engine ranking for such a popular one-word term -' especially when Google's domains and subdomains already dominate the top 30 search engine results for its own name.
Nevertheless, I've already mentioned Lahr's article to partners, clients and prospects. And I made fair use of it in my presentation during the News Search SEO session that June at the Search Engine Strategies conference in London.
Why do I think this unoptimized article with its ironic headline is a must read? Let me give you three key reasons.
First, Lohr reported that search engines deliver "30 percent or more of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites." This little nugget alone is worth more than the price of the Sunday edition of the newspaper of record.
Second, search engine experts told Lohr that natural-language processing algorithms "scan the title, headline and at least the first hundred words or so of news articles," so journalists "would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences." Since one of these experts was Danny Sullivan, who is the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, journalists would be stupid to ignore this advice.
Third, Lohr wrote that "news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results." And he provided examples from The Associate Press, BBC News, CBS Digital Media, The New York Times, and The Sacramento Bee.
While I strongly recommend reading "This Boring Headline Is Written for Google," I also think that it left out some related content - that would have made an interesting sidebar. While Lohr mentions Google four times and Yahoo twice in his 1,200-word article, he doesn't mention Google News or Yahoo News at all.
That's ironic, considering that both of these news search engines were in the Top 10 News & Media Web sites during March 2006, according to Hitwise. And that's doubly ironic, considering that Google News delivered 52.9% of its traffic and Yahoo News delivered 27.5% of its traffic to "News and Media" Web sites that month, according to a Hitwise Clickstream Report.
So, hopefully, we'll see a follow-up article in the foreseeable future. And, instead of "This Boring Headline Is Written for Google," we'll scan its clever title and read, "This News Headline Is Optimized by The New York Times."
Greg Jarboe is a partner in Newsforce. He is also the president of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm and public relations agency.
