As more and more worshipers gather at the shrine of PageRank (apostle of Google), headlines across the web, be it on news sites or blogs, are declining.
Gone are the days you see quality headlines like ‘Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious’ (in reference to underdog Caledonian Thistle beating Celtic in a Scottish Cup match). Or ‘Young Boys Wankdorf Erection Relief’ on the Young Boys football team opening the Stade de Suisse Wankdorf stadium.
Most sites now have boring, generic headlines which attempt to hit the correct keywords, keywords that were painfully assembled by the “SEO analyst” cottage industry and disseminated to everyone who flips them a quarter1.
I remember when Rails 2.0 first came out, and many bloggers jumped through hoops to include the word “restful” in their blog post titles, to the points of absurdity. It wasn’t to the extent of “Restful Deploying with Capistrano” but it ran pretty close.
Why is this short-sighted? Namely because everyone else is going to be competing in the same space with the same keywords. If your SEO tuning is perfect you may end up on the top hits for those terms on Google, but only for a certain time. PageRank has many variables, and you’re only optimizing for one. Newer posts with the same keywords will eventually take over.
Instead, why not craft a memorable headline, one that sticks in a reader’s memory when they want to google for it again? Are you more apt to remember one of the posts titled “Ruby Rake Tasks for Rails” or Rakie Pankie?
The main issue with SEO is that it’s dealing with a semi-black box in a constantly changing environment. And this may be anecdoctal, but I notice that heavily search-optimized sites are generally doing it to make up for their lack of useful content. Sites looking for long-term growth with loyal visitors who help promote their site with word of mouth may want to try a new-fangled, revolutionary method called “content optimization”, or in today’s vernacular, “not sucking balls”.
1 Try googling about SEO sometime. Many of blogs on SEO have repetitive content, practice circle-jerk linking, and generally exude a very foul odor. The majority of SEO blogs are the sewage of the Internet.
