Last January I sat down in a bit of a mood and typed out what seemed at the time a disposable, one-off screed about the way some particularly thoughtless bloggers seem to compose their posts. It took me something like fifteen minutes. I checked for typoes, failed to find them all, hit “publish” and walked over to the grocery store with The Raven.
In the middle of shopping – I think I was looking at canned corned beef hash – I got a message from Hank Fox, who’d seen the piece linked over at PeeZed’s joint. The message read:
If you have any way to bump up your bandwidth, you might want to do that right now. I’ll bet you’ll go viral on this one.
This was neither the first nor the last time Hank proved perceptive, and for evidence of same you should buy his book. But at the time I chuckled, thanked Hank in my mind for saying something kind (though possibly I forgot to thank him where he could hear it, which is the worst of my many bad habits) and went over to look at the tinned salmon. Traffic spikes I’ve had before, what with the whole Zeke saga and essays about serial killers I have known and graphic novelizations of social commentary and Prufrock parodies and the like. Been there, done that, I thought. The next day I was struggling to strip down the site’s ExpressionEngine templates so that the 100,000 people who stopped by would actually see the site load. I got more visits in a day than I had in my busiest month beforehand, in seven years of blogging with increasing traffic. Eventually, after Every Single Person on Twitter had linked the post and luminary sites from Andrew Sullivan to Kottke to BoingBoing had sent traffic my way, after the comment thread got up toward 400 or so, traffic started to die down some, though it did flare up a couple times. It didn’t die down all the way. Today, a year later, that page got more hits than my home page and my two most recent posts combined. My traffic has more or less returned to the status quo ante, but it took time. In sum, the post got the kind of traffic start-up bloggers dream of, the kind of traffic that would seem to ensure them a place in the A-list, though more on that later.
The post’s title was “This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post.”
A week after I posted the thing, the Boston Globe kindly offered me a couple hundred bucks for reprint rights, and it appeared in their pages on Valentine’s Day. The title under which it ran?
“How to write an incendiary blog post.”
If you look at the URL of the Boston Globe page, you’ll see that it includes my original title. This says to me that the piece was slotted, perhaps even initially published, with the original title and that someone came by and changed it after. The discrepancy didn’t go unnoticed – there was at least one complaint in the comments, sadly now behind a paywall. (Though that paywall did send me a check.) I’m not privy to the Globe’s editorial process, but my sense is that there were likely two reasons for the change: Search Engine Optimization, and a misguided adherence to the precepts of Jakob Nielsen.
Let’s take that last one first. Jakob Nielsen, for those of you who don’t know, is a long-time advocate of web usability, not that his website argues his case all that well. Almost since the dawn of the Web, Nielsen has advocated that web authors write in spare, unadorned text with the important stuff in bold, because people don’t have time for anything else. It’s kind of a “The Web As PowerPoint” ethos, which I guess makes Nielsen the Anti-Tufte. In any event, Nielsen’s attitude toward web writing is nicely summed up in this para, stolen from a study he co-authored:
“Really good writing - you don’t see much of that on the Web,” said one of our test participants. And our general impression is that most Web users would agree. Our studies suggest that current Web writing often does not support users in achieving their main goal: to find useful information as quickly as possible.
That study was written up in 1997, but Nielsen’s attitude toward web writing has not changed much in the interim. About five years ago, in a posting I’ve slammed before, Nielsen wrote:
Sadly, even though weblogs are native to the Web, authors rarely follow the guidelines for writing for the Web in terms of making content scannable. This applies to a posting’s body text, but it’s even more important with headlines. Users must be able to grasp the gist of an article by reading its headline. Avoid cute or humorous headlines that make no sense out of context.
Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog in search engines, newsfeeds (RSS), and other external environments. In those contexts, users often see only the headline and use it to determine whether to click into the full posting. Even if users see a short abstract along with the headline (as with most search engines), user testing shows that people often read only the headline. In fact, people often read only the first three or four words of a headline when scanning a list of possible places to go.
Sample bad headlines:
- What Is It That You Want?
- Hey, kids! Comics!
- Victims Abandoned
Sample good headlines:
- Pictures from Die Hunns and Black Halos show
- Office Depot Pays United States $4.75 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations
(too long, but even if you only read the first few words, you have an idea of what it’s about)- Ice cream trucks as church marketing
This last headline works on a church-related blog. If you’re writing an ice cream industry blog, start the headline with the word “church” because it’s the information-carrying word within a context of all ice cream, all the time.
It’s clear that whoever wrote the headline on the Globe’s version of my piece had heard something very like Nielsen’s recommendation handed down as received wisdom, or at least as part of the house stylebook. The original metareferential title didn’t clearly state what the article contained, and according to Nielsen that makes it a bad headline.
You get a similar line from advocates of Search Engine Optimization, those people whose business is getting your site to show up higher in search results for Google and Yahoo – you know, the ones responsible for creating circumstances in which others must spend millions of person-hours every day controlling blog comment spam. The headline – whether page title or link text – should tell people exactly what’s in the article, they say, so that people will know what’s in your article before they even read it. There’s certainly justification for this approach. In tech writing, for instance, it just makes sense. If your article explains how to repair your mobile phone in the field, it’s clearly better to entitle it something like “Fixing Your Mobile Phone On The Road” rather than “When ET Can’t Phone Home” or “The SIM Sins” or “Lost Verizon.” Likewise for articles containing straight-up AP-style inverted pyramid news stories. Straightforward is helpful.
But how, exactly, would someone following that general “Headline Same As Article But Much Shorter” rule of thumb approach writing a title for this post? Following Nielsen’s advice would spoil the joke, making it pointless to post the thing at all. Though it may have been anyway. Should I have entitled this one“Insomnia while camping” rather than “Pine Needles?” Could I have entitled this post in any other way but the way I chose?
For the web visitor whose goal is simply to get in, get info and get out, Nielsen’s advice is sensible – a mere matter of user interface, nothing more. In this way, the Globe’s kludgeing of my piece’s headline last year makes a kind of sense. They reduced the number of firing neurons needed to grasp what my piece would be about after reading the title from four or five to something like two. They explained the hidden punchline of the piece in the first two words. For the web visitor in a hurry, this was all to the good.
But not everyone who posts writing on the web is doing so for the benefit of web visitors. Some of us are more interested in readers. Eyeballs are one thing. Eyeballs hooked up to a functioning cerebrum is an altogether different, better thing. It’s a simple concept that seems surprisingly hard for some experts to grasp: there is more than one kind of writing on the web. There are news alerts. There are How To shorts. There is poetry. There are aimless diary entries. There are screed. There are plays, short stories, rants, recipes, verbal fusillades meant to inflame, prose meant to enlighten, verse meant to perplex. Try to make rules about structure and tempo and tone for any writing that appears on paper, and you’ll be laughed out of the one remaining independent bookstore in your county. The Web isn’t a genre. It’s a medium. The Web is paper, only faster and with a higher carbon footprint. Tech pundits and journalism pundits seem slowest to grasp this general point, for some reason, but the vast majority of writing on the web is neither tech writing nor journalism. It’s essay, memoir, epistolary writing – literature. Not all of it’s good literature, mind. But literature.
The “Incendiary” spike was much larger than the Prufrock or Zeke or “What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts The Graphic Novel” spikes, but it shared a key feature with all the others I’ve seen here: almost none of the web visitors who arrived during that spike ever showed up again. A hundred thousand people in a day, and a handful of them stuck around for a week or so afterwards and made pleasant conversation in comments, and then no evidence that the spike had had a lasting effect on traffic. (If you’re reading this and you found the place that week, you’re a statistical exception and I’m really glad you’re here. Say hello, whydoncha?)
This is a feature, not a bug. People see a hundred websites a day. They pay repeat visits to – they read – the sites that strike a chord in them. If the writing resonates, and if they’re possessed of the requisite literacy, they’ll happily cruise through posts far longer than this one seems to be getting. If not, there is no title so punchy and on-topic that the first para in the article won’t get a distracted “tl;dr” in reply, that peculiar Internetty statement by which the reader externalizes responsibility for his or her deficient attention span.
I’m halfway tempted to claim that my tendency to title posts in oblique and even completely obscure ways is meant as a compassionate filter for readers who aren’t quite in sync with my way of looking at the world; a way of saving them the time they’d spend trying to figure me out. Really, though, it’s just that I don’t hold eyeballs as the main reason for doing this. The net result of that huge spike in traffic was a brief and sharp increase in the costs I incur to host the site (though those were eventually more than covered by writers’ fees from the Globe and a book it’s being anthologized in.) All those people coming by meant at best a few steady readers, and I add a few steady readers in a slow month as well. If you’ve made it this far through this “tl;dr”-inspiring post, you’re definitely one of them. I’m very glad you’re here. Let the eyeballs fall where they may.
=v= Usually I think hard about my headlines (or Subject: lines), and they’re not always descriptive. On the web, there are meta tags to handle SEO, problem solved.
=v= Usually I think hard about my headlines (or Subject: lines), and they’re not always descriptive. On the web, there are meta tags to handle SEO, problem solved.
I’m sure this was a good article, but without the SEO’d H2 subheads every other paragraph, and the fact the paragraphs were more than 2 sentences long, I wasn’t able to skim it and get the gist of what you were trying to say. Something about deep reading, maybe? ;)
Interesting title for this article.
A-fuckin-men, brother. I would go so far as to say that the quirky titles are one of the reasons I have remained a loyal reader of this blog over the years. That kind of bad blogging advice has stuck in my craw for years, though I didn’t know who specifically to blame for it. It is useful to have some inkling of how SEO works, of course, for cases like the ones you mention: I sometimes write tech articles if the information isn’t already easily findable on Google, as a service to others like myself, and then a bland, bald title is exactly what’s needed.
I second Dave’s “A-fuckin-men”! I couldn’t care less about being SEO. Like you, my titles mean something to me and that’s what counts. My posts are cathartic or mental spillage or utilitarian or whatever. My site is my journal. What none of those things are is a rule-induced headache for me. And in eight years of not giving a damn about being SEO, people find me just fine and I’m happy with what I do. The moment it becomes work making it fit some predefined pattern is the moment I stop doing it.
Thanks so much for this. My eyeballs stuck with it till the end, and I learned a lot. I write a blog full of quirky titles, and I don’t care how long (or short) my blog posts are because I only want readers who actually want to read what I have to say. I figure the others will go away. I have seen odd little spikes, too, usually related to some kind of sex word in the title, but sometimes it’s origami, or the frigate bird. Sigh….
SEO fascinates me, but mostly in a repulsive way. The best blogs to read are the ones that aren’t built for the purpose of catching eyeballs. That’s not the point of literature, which, I agree with you, online writing is.
Yes. Nielsen’s suggestions might be valid for news sites, but if one is of a more literary bent - and particularly if one expects one’s readers to have a degree of intelligence - SEO or descriptive titles just don’t cut it.
Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro” wouldn’t have benefited from a title such as “Couple discusses abortion while drinking beer”. In overlooking intent in favor of SEO-friendly titles, Nielsen effectively smacks headfirst into a tree while seeking the forest.
So, not even though I made it through the blog post but I actually liked it. I take it as a good sign, there must be some cortex left behind my eyeballs in spite of all the stuff I am trying to learn about SEO…
I’ve got my own blog for quite a while now, it is the personal kind(not private but reflecting my personal choices, taste, bias etc). And there are few readers but they are steady visitors , the few that like the way I write… Now, a couple months ago I started to work on a blog initiative for a public transportation advocacy group. This is a new blogging experience and as you noted – now the titles do matter as we are trying to do some outreach/marketing and get as many visitors as possible. Transitioning from one approach to another had been difficult as it would be probably for any (wannabe) writer transitioning from writing literature/poetry/essay to writing news and advertising. So, in short , I’m glad I came across this post …