The headline to David Carr's New York Times article yesterday: "Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline."
As Carr explains, the headline was intentionally written to make a point about the current state of article headlines on the Web. Apparently 'Taylor Momsen' is a hot search engine keyword phrase, says Carr, and many headlines are written today in order to get the article to rank highly in search engine queries.
Carr's piece raises an excellent question. Are we sacrificing the clever, witty, or even meaningful headline on the altar of SEO? Or worse, are we too tempted to write headlines that are full of hot search engine keywords but aren't entirely relevant to the articles that follow?
It's difficult to write a headline that quickly explains what the article is about; is clever or witty; and that contains hot, relevant keyword phrases. Some publications, such as The New Yorker, stick to the clever and witty headline in the print version of the article and then write more descriptive, SEO-friendly headlines for the Web version of the story, which makes sense.
The bigger question is: Are journalism and SEO on a collision course? Can the two coexist peaceably? I believe they can, as long as SEO is kept in perspective.
For example, I often use the Wordtracker Keyword Questions tool to see which questions search engine users are most frequently typing, relative to a particular topic. If I have something I believe may be useful or interesting to say relative to the most searched-on phrase, then I'll write about that and use the phrase in my headline.
I wouldn't concoct an article on that topic, however, just to get some SEO traction out of it. If people come to your site from Google, Bing or Yahoo! searches and your content is worthless, you've wasted your time and theirs.
