Offtopic: Headlines

Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Breakfast Bytes will not appear and so today, the last post before the holiday, I go offtopic. Not too far off-topic, since this affects blogging as well as being amusing.

Headlines and Titles

One problem with headlines, and this applies to blog post titles too, is that what is good for people is not the same as what is good for search engines.

For example, I've had a subscription to The Economist for about forty years from before when I moved from the UK to the US. Of course, forty years ago there was a print edition and that was it. The internet did not yet exist. The Economist was famous for witty headlines, often involving puns or words that sound close, that made you smile and also want to read the article. For some time, they would have different headlines for the print and online editions for many articles, with a clever headline in the print edition and something with all the right words in it in the online edition. But they seem to have stopped doing that and scanning the latest online edition to try and find a good example, all the articles seem to end up with the usual Economist small print:

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "High-voltage mire"

But even though it is unclear what the piece is about (Mexican energy policy) and so not good for search engines, this is also the online headline. But the HTML title is more informative: "Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s energy policy will hurt Mexico".

Here's one example of a good Economist headline. The topic is the cost of making cell phone calls overseas, back from the day when there were big roaming charges all over Europe (and the rest of the world). Headline:

When in roam

Our blogging platform allows me to do something similar to having two headlines, since I can have one headline that appears on the page and in listings of posts, but a separate headline is used for search optimization. I've not done enough A-B testing to investigate how much difference this makes, but I do know roughly a third of readers of a Breakfast Bytes post come via search engines. The other two-thirds are split roughly equally between people who click through a link in the weekly Sunday Brunch email, and people who just come by regularly. You should join both these clubs! To sign up for the weekly Sunday Brunch email just click on "sign me up" at the end of any post.

Classic Newspaper Headlines

I was reminded of this recently when this Twitter feed showed up, prompted by this marvelous headline to a review of the movie The Tragedy of Macbeth:

This prompted other people to dig up their favorite headlines, top of the list being:

Small Earthquake in Chile...

My favorite headline story dates from, I think, the 1970s. The journalists at The Times (the London one) decided to have a competition to see who could get the dullest headline through the editing hierarchy and get it actually published in the paper. The winner was sub-editor Claude Cockburn with his headline:

Small Earthquake in Chile; Not Many Dead

Sometimes headlines get even more dull when the editor responsible forgets to replace the placeholder text:

And since we came in with a Twitter feed, let's go out with a mixed message about Twitter from the (London) Evening Standard:

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