I thought this was going to be about all the sites on Tumblr that read like the copy was finalized on a napkin, make you hunt for tiny navigation arrows, and yet end up being full of some pretty cool stuff that shows up in Google results.
Edit: It's still kind of a cool idea anyway. I recently contacted a guy about his Perl-driven site to ask him how the plumbing worked, just because it looked like it was still going strong based on code that was written in 1995 and maintained to this day. There's something cool and comforting about seeing sites that aren't powered by Node or Wintersmith or some other zippy new thing--especially if they have become really popular for some reason or another.
Satire, I think. Sadly, the idea that SEO has killed the art of artsy headline writing is pretty prevalent in the media industry, in which traditional j-school courses have classes devoted to copy-writing/headlines, and in which "Headless body found in topless bar" is the gold standard.
That is a pretty good headline, and one that doesn't need to be optimized (unless the body belonged to someone relatively famous), or the stripper bar was owned by a city councilmember. But the point of SEO is to make content accessible in the long-tail...A headline celebrating the home team finally winning the Super Bowl, "YES! FINALLY!", has some poetic power but its impact is in its context and display...that is, 160-pt font across the top with huge celebratory photos.
But "YES! FINALLY!" doesn't tell you anything about the story when viewed a week later in a search engine or archive results. It's strange that newspapers, which pride themselves on being the official recordkeepers of history, often have such a dim view of the importance of SEO...which really, when done with non-black-hat intentions, is reader-optimized text.
Edit: one more point...many news editors who hate on SEO still seem to be unaware that you can do a SEO headline in the meta tags while preserving the pithy headline for he we page display...so it's not even really a dilemma between art and business, just technical ignorance.
> But the point of SEO is to make content accessible in the long-tail
It shouldn't be the job of editors to second guess search engines. A search engine that doesn't give you my article about the home team winning the superbowl because I titled it "YES! FINALLY!" is a poor search engine (all other things being equal).
The point is that content is compromised by the all-too-widespread practice of making sure our content is accessible to machines first, and humans second.
If the home team win the superbowl, I want to say "YES! FINALLY!" without fear of losing audience.
In today's internet, I have to say "Home team win Superbowl 2013 sports news football usa teams stats"
I think of newspapers more as the "first draft of history" than the "official recordkeepers".
One of the little pleasures of reading newspaper archives from a hundred years ago is seeing their vernacular and the particular way of communicating they used, which on the one hand is often a puzzle to decipher but on the other hand gives you a clear vision into what people were really thinking then.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|12 years ago|reply
Edit: It's still kind of a cool idea anyway. I recently contacted a guy about his Perl-driven site to ask him how the plumbing worked, just because it looked like it was still going strong based on code that was written in 1995 and maintained to this day. There's something cool and comforting about seeing sites that aren't powered by Node or Wintersmith or some other zippy new thing--especially if they have become really popular for some reason or another.
[+] [-] werner34|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GotAnyMegadeth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visakanv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user24|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsfyn55|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisBanner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssharp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
That is a pretty good headline, and one that doesn't need to be optimized (unless the body belonged to someone relatively famous), or the stripper bar was owned by a city councilmember. But the point of SEO is to make content accessible in the long-tail...A headline celebrating the home team finally winning the Super Bowl, "YES! FINALLY!", has some poetic power but its impact is in its context and display...that is, 160-pt font across the top with huge celebratory photos.
But "YES! FINALLY!" doesn't tell you anything about the story when viewed a week later in a search engine or archive results. It's strange that newspapers, which pride themselves on being the official recordkeepers of history, often have such a dim view of the importance of SEO...which really, when done with non-black-hat intentions, is reader-optimized text.
Edit: one more point...many news editors who hate on SEO still seem to be unaware that you can do a SEO headline in the meta tags while preserving the pithy headline for he we page display...so it's not even really a dilemma between art and business, just technical ignorance.
[+] [-] user24|12 years ago|reply
It shouldn't be the job of editors to second guess search engines. A search engine that doesn't give you my article about the home team winning the superbowl because I titled it "YES! FINALLY!" is a poor search engine (all other things being equal).
The point is that content is compromised by the all-too-widespread practice of making sure our content is accessible to machines first, and humans second.
If the home team win the superbowl, I want to say "YES! FINALLY!" without fear of losing audience.
In today's internet, I have to say "Home team win Superbowl 2013 sports news football usa teams stats"
[+] [-] mherdeg|12 years ago|reply
One of the little pleasures of reading newspaper archives from a hundred years ago is seeing their vernacular and the particular way of communicating they used, which on the one hand is often a puzzle to decipher but on the other hand gives you a clear vision into what people were really thinking then.
[+] [-] normloman|12 years ago|reply