Just a short one. I’ve blogged before about Googleability vs. Creativity in print and web headlines, and how search engine optimisation is currently doing to the English language more or less what Doctor Beeching did for the railways 45 years ago. This is an interesting case in point.

Yesterday evening the BBC News website published a piece on the government’s evacuation plans for Britons stranded due to Iceland’s volcanic eruption. The title for the article, impressively enough, was

‘Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures.’ (visual)

Yes. That’s one headline with seven nouns, leaving BBC News journalists looking like they had been instructed to shoehorn as many keywords into the headline as possible. Is it really necessary? Do the BBC – who already have such strong web-presence and brand identity – need to pander to the search engines in this way?

Still, perhaps one of the subs realised that they had got carried away, for when I looked this morning they had changed the headline to ‘Volcano cloud Britons could return via ‘Spanish hub’ – almost equally ugly, but at least down to four nouns. (Which is plenty).

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Image credit: atibens

Original story via @Sarah_Bakewell

Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.

As ever, comments welcome.

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Sources Used:

“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]

“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]

“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]

“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]

image credit: zipenfish

Outside Euston Square station this morning stood a model with blue eyes and a big smile. She was selling copies of today’s Sun newspaper, upon the front of which was the headline:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

The editor, probably happy with his splash, had decided to be proactive. They had sent people out to sell their Jordan and Peter Andre story directly. It was later pointed out to me that inside the paper was another headline:

“Sex with Jordan? That’s out of the equestrian.”

Tabloids have long been famous for their inventive headlines and today it was nice to see that the paper was being bold and creative with their front page. Two features of newspaper journalism that are becoming increasingly scarce.

It reminds me of a long list of such headlines, a few of which I’ll add here:

1. “Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious” (A Scottish newspaper in response to Celtic’s defeat by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in 2000)
2. “Nut Screws Washer and Bolts” (A report of a mental patient who raped a cleaning assistant at an asylum in California and later escaped)
3. “Slumdog has the Pedigree to Winalot” (On a portentous opening weekend for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire in the UK)
4. “Elton takes David up the aisle” (Elton John marries long term partner David Furnish)

When I look at such headlines I always recall an excellent article that was written by Shane Richmond in the British Journalism Review. He looks at the example of The Sun’s famous ‘Gotcha’, headline during the Falklands conflict and reasons why such a headline would be highly unlikely today due to the importance of SEO and page views for journalists. He wrote:

“The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.

The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.”

Keyword journalism

SEO is important to journalists today and everyone should have a basic understanding of it. If The Sun were concerned solely with drawing the maximum number of searcher into their websites they should used tools such as Hitwise or Google Trends to give keyword information about relevant searches. Most likely the SEO headline that would have resulted would have to be to the order of:

“Jockey speaks following Jordan and Andre’s spit”

Which is obviously very different to:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

I’m glad that The Sun have decided to swap Googleability for creativity. It’s two fingers up to the people that think SEO and page views count for everything – and, if nothing else, it’s earned them a blog post.

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Update:

As Martin Belam points out, it’s not quite the two fingers up to SEO that I was imagining earlier, as the title tag (the bit up in the left hand corner) for the article on The Sun’s website reads: “Jordan’s horseman friend denies fling” - which is far more palatable for the bots.

Different headlines for different mediums – another journalistic lesson.