I read a post today from Jakob Nielsen that reaffirmed everything I’ve been preaching to the Tribune newsrooms around the country.
Here’s an excerpt of Jakob Nielsen’s post:
”
It’s hard enough to write for the Web and meet the guidelines for concise, scannable, and objective content. It’s even harder to write Web headlines, which must be:
- short (because people don’t read much online);
- rich in information scent, clearly summarizing the target article;
- front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items);
- understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results); and
- predictable, so users know whether they’ll like the full article before they click (because people don’t return to sites that promise more than they deliver).
”
He did a fantastic job of summarizing the human reasons as to why you’d want to do the above, now let’s talk about the search engine optimization reasons why you’d want to do the above:
- Short – Because if you use an H1 tag as your headline (and you should) then the search engines are looking for only a few words. Get much longer and Googlebot will start thinking you are a spammer trying to ‘H1 stuff’.
- Rich in Information – Semantically Googlebot is going to want to make sure that whatever is in the H1 tag is ontrack with what is in the rest of the page’s content as well. The more accurate the headline is to the content of the page, the happier Googlebot will be. I often speak about an example with Metromix.com and their St. Patrick’s Day ’08 page that had the title of ‘Get Lucky!’ for a ‘St. Patrick’s Day bars’ story. Googlebot can’t make the semantic leap . . . Googlebot is a robot . . . not a human.
- Front Loaded - If you put your keyphrase towards the front of your H tags and Title tags, they are weighted more heavily. I’ve seen this time and time again not only at Tribune but while I was at OneCall, Targus, SimpleTech and definitely at Viking Components. I used to have a hard time justifying this particular point for humans but, now I will just reference Jakob Nielsen!
- Understandable Out of Context - This is done to keep the keywords in the anchor text. Sure it helps the humans (whatever, just kidding) but it also keeps the relevancy high for Googlebot. If we always used ‘Get Lucky!’ anchor text to even a page that was optimized like ‘St. Patrick’s Day bars’, you’d still lose the cross-page (and possibly cross-sub or cross-domain depending on link network) relevance.
- Predictable - If your humans don’t like the destination page then they won’t link to it either. If they don’t link to it . . . then Googlebot doesn’t either (from its SERPs). Googlebot may also one day weigh heavily the back button, time spent, multiple related queries per session, ultimate destination during session, etc. If we are watching our exit rates from our own websites, don’t you think Google is too?
While I do feel that Jakob Nielsen should update his site design at least a little bit (think he keeps it more for shock than function anymore frankly), he is definitely the utmost authority on usability. I just love that the search engines are getting smart enough (though they are still really stupid) that what’s good for a proper user experience (at least in this example) is also good for a search engine and vice-versa.
I can finally answer the whines and groans that occur in nearly every training that usually start with . . .
“but that’s not what our users want . . .
“but that’s just so boring, who’d ever read that . . .
“less and less about the readers . . .
“that goes against everything we were taught in journalism school . . .
Update: You know you have good people at your company when they wrote the same information listed above but clear back in 1993 (republished to web in 2007). Take a look at what Charlie Meyerson, Online Producer at Chicago Tribune, wrote about: How To Write Radio News (or Anything Else) Your Audience Won’t Tune Out