About once a year some asshole writes a story called something like “Bush, Condi ‘Israel Needs Porn Before Peace’” about how the most popular news stories online contain the word porn in their title. They go on to explain the key to massive popularity, and bags of money dropping from the sky, is a few well chosen keywords. Invariably, the story their deceptive title promised would have been more interesting than their suspect marketing analysis. Joel Stein’s addition to the canon for the LA Times is a prime example and, though funny, is complete bullshit.
Any headline the LA, NY or London Times publishes is seen by millions of people via websites, RSS feeds and news aggregators and the majority are ignored as old, irrelevant or repetitious. When a juicy headline appears publishers sees a surge of activity not because the internet’s responded to keywords, but because people have clicked through to read something they would have passed over.
Using a provocative keyword won’t work if you’re not already being ignored by a significant group of potential readers. If you’re not being regularly ignored, there’s no one to excite with a punchy headline who’s aware of who you are but outside your established readership. Search engines respond too slowly to make keywords useful for driving interest in specific items and the most likely result of an attempt to make content ‘keyword rich’ is getting blacklisted. To suggest a single-use in a headline is a clever trick would be laughable if it wasn’t ‘Fear Factor’ dumb.
If you do want to generate traffic for a site using headlines and keywords you need to be smart. Any keyword at all will work if you’re fast enough and when there are only 5 results for a search, you win if you’re one of them. The downside to a reliance on speed is moving down search results as fast as bigger sources with more authority catch up to you.
Far better is to think of an interesting, valid, angle on a current story around which you can write a headline interesting enough to get picked up by people digging for information. While CNN report ‘Beirut Shelling Crisis’ you capitalize by writing ‘Beirut Prostitutes Work Through Shelling.’ Even among a hundred results for a search on ‘Beirut, Shelling’ it’s going to get noticed and, if it’s linked by sites larger than yours, a positive feedback loop starts working on your behalf. Of course - it all starts with the story.
Guys like Joel Stein don’t care. Given a hundred LA Times articles to browse and only one which includes the phrases ‘Heidi Klum’, ‘naked’ and ‘cake’ where are you going to start? He gets to keep his job and the circle of bad marketing advice rolls on.