I always enjoy reading a good headline, they always make me chuckle. However, with the dawning of SEO, witty headlines are causing to be a problem.
Crafty headlines are just not SEO-friendly. A much better headline would include the keywords and wouldn't have much room for puns or plays on words.
The Atlantic has weight in on this notion with its recent article "Google Doesn't Laugh Saving Witty Headlines in the Age of SEO."
Matthew Crowly, a copy editor for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has won awards for his on-so-clever headlines. "I understand the shift toward search optimization" he told The Atlantic. "But I think we're losing something when we take the wordplay and surprise out of headline writing."
In many ways, SEO is killing the art of the clever headline in journalism, and it doesn't seem like a trend that will reverse as long as such a huge chunk of Web traffic comes from search engines.
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post addressed this same issue last summer, and he didn't offer optimism either.
Showing posts with label Search Engines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Search Engines. Show all posts
Monday, May 16, 2011
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Google Takes on Facebook
"Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon" tweeted Kevin Rose, the tech entrepreneur who founded the content-sharing site Digg. The message that the online world that we all have come to love may drastically change sent a shiver up most social media enthusiast's spines.
Search engine giant, Google, is going to take on social networking powerhouse Facebook with a service reportedly called "Google Me," but hasn't disclosed yet how it will be different. This of course leaves all of us in the blogosphere wondering. Will it integrate Google's existing social networking services like, Orkut or Buzz? Will it build onto Google Profiles?
Just recently my friend and I tried out Google's newest innovation: A Gmail feature that allows you to place a phone call through your computer. The service is free in the US and Canada for at least the rest of this year and costs as little as two cents a minute to dial countries such as Germany and Japan.
However, the most radical idea of the year was Google's jump into social gaming. (Currently, Facebook is the most important platform for this kind of game.) Google has already taken steps onto 'Facebook's turf.' In August, Google announced that they were buying Slide for $228 million, a start-up that makes apps for social networking. Also, Google recently invested in Zynga, the company behind the popular Facebook game, FarmVille.
So, why is Google doing this? Google wants your time. Networking and playing games takes more of your time than searching, and time is money.
According to Nielsen Co. report, Americans spend 22.7 percent of their online time on social networks and blogs, compared with 3.5 percent on search-engine sites. Further, social networking sites have boomed more than any other category that Nielsen tracks for share of US Internet time; they were up 43 percent in June of this year compared to June 2009. In contrast, search engines only edged ahead one percent.
Facebook is definitely enjoying its glory days, but will they last forever? I'm not sure. I do believe that if any other company is to take on Facebook, it should be Google. It will be interesting to see how they differentiate their social networking site. I predict that this element will be the key factor to the site's success or failure.
Search engine giant, Google, is going to take on social networking powerhouse Facebook with a service reportedly called "Google Me," but hasn't disclosed yet how it will be different. This of course leaves all of us in the blogosphere wondering. Will it integrate Google's existing social networking services like, Orkut or Buzz? Will it build onto Google Profiles?
Just recently my friend and I tried out Google's newest innovation: A Gmail feature that allows you to place a phone call through your computer. The service is free in the US and Canada for at least the rest of this year and costs as little as two cents a minute to dial countries such as Germany and Japan.
However, the most radical idea of the year was Google's jump into social gaming. (Currently, Facebook is the most important platform for this kind of game.) Google has already taken steps onto 'Facebook's turf.' In August, Google announced that they were buying Slide for $228 million, a start-up that makes apps for social networking. Also, Google recently invested in Zynga, the company behind the popular Facebook game, FarmVille.
So, why is Google doing this? Google wants your time. Networking and playing games takes more of your time than searching, and time is money.
According to Nielsen Co. report, Americans spend 22.7 percent of their online time on social networks and blogs, compared with 3.5 percent on search-engine sites. Further, social networking sites have boomed more than any other category that Nielsen tracks for share of US Internet time; they were up 43 percent in June of this year compared to June 2009. In contrast, search engines only edged ahead one percent.
Facebook is definitely enjoying its glory days, but will they last forever? I'm not sure. I do believe that if any other company is to take on Facebook, it should be Google. It will be interesting to see how they differentiate their social networking site. I predict that this element will be the key factor to the site's success or failure.
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