De-Optimized Content
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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.
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"
But that point aside, it is the editor's job to second guess things, as you say. By writing a headline, an editor is implicitly saying, just in case you don't get to reading every story on this page, here's a 10 to 100 word summary of what it's about. The difference here is the medium...the print page makes it easy to convey meaning through design and photos. A search engine does not. And unless you want your search result pages to look like Myspace, I think it's important for the metadata to convey actual meaning that doesn't require the context (I.e. Buying a back issue of the newspaper) for it to make sense
says who? How do you know how Google works? Do they pay attention to metatags any more? Even if we knew they did, the rest of the algorithm is deliberately mysterious to the point that if Site A is ranking higher than Site B, and Site A happens to have more descriptive titles, Site B will start copying that style in the name of "SEO" and you're back to square one. Metatags indeed.
> it is the editor's job to second guess things
That's not what I said. I said it's not the job of editors to second guess search engines.
I think the theory of headlines goes far beyond "here's a summary".
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.