Hotels, Facebook, sex, and Justin Bieber: You are searching this headline
22 Feb 2011 8:29 AM
A recent article in the New York Times spotlights how The Huffington Post (THP) is so successful on the web. If you write for the web, you need to take notice.One of the main reasons is the editors at Huff Post know how people and search engines work. There are top search terms (like the ones in my headline), and the editors fixate on those in their headlines and the first few words of their posts. Such techniques brought the Huff Post 35 percent of its January visits from search engines. By comparison, visits to CNN.com from search engines accounted for 20 percent of January visits, according to the New York Times article.
Some of the most popular posts on the Huff Post have fewer than 100 words, relying instead on slide shows. Yet, it doesn't matter if you have 20, 200, or 2,000 words in your post: You have to concentrate on the first two dozen, because that is how readers who usually don’t follow you may find you.
The article’s example of how successful THP has become was its coverage of Christina Aguilera forgetting one line of the national anthem before the Super Bowl. As folks searched for information about this, THP isolated key words that folks were searching for and put them into this headline:
Watch: Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem
What I think THP is so brilliant at is their verb and adjective choices in headlines. Aguilera didn’t “goof” or “oops” or “make a mistake” or “forget a line.” She “totally messes up.” That’s not a search term, that’s an excellent, active adjective/verb combination that makes the headline come alive (also, the word “watch” means there is a video attached, which is probably what you are searching for anyway).Search engines concentrate on headlines and the first few words of your article. In many ways, the headline may be the most important part of the text you write. Now, this doesn’t mean that you turn into an SEO (search engine optimization) machine, spitting out words like the ones in my headline with no rhyme (just reason). But it does mean your headline should not be an afterthought.
For example, I was writing a post on email when I checked the popularity of the term with Google's Adwords. I spotted that the term “hotmail” was searched 10 times more often than “email” globally, two times more often in the U.S. alone. So I made sure that both words showed up in the headline or the first bit of text.
So, dig in and start knowing these things. Just don’t mention Mr. Bieber in your headline without writing about him.
--Doug Thomas
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