In the quest to bring the old media into the new, and show editors and publishers how people use the Web to get what they need, this one is a relatively minor skirmish. Still, it can’t help but stick in the craw.

Publishers love getting traffic to their sites from search engines because it increases eyeballs, provides more opportunities to make ad impressions, more opportunities to get a newsletter subscription, upsell them to a premium subscription, and make money. Editors love getting traffic to their site from search engines because it boosts their ego. (I love editors, really.)

Optimizing the site for search engines has the pleasant side effect of optimizing both revenue and the ego, so professionals like me are called in to open our bag of tricks labelled “SEO.” And if you emptied that bag and tried to make sense of it, you’ll find that SEO is mostly about putting the key subjects, nouns, names, and other things that may be searched for in places that search engine spiders go to look for them. For the most part, that means the HTML <title> tag and the <h1> tags in the body.

For the editor that I had this discussion with, those tags are populated automatically by his publishing platform with the headline that he writes for the article. The trouble is, this editor is having a very hard time letting go of the creative headlines that he’s written his entire career to draw in readers of his print magazine, and he’s giving up eyeballs of people searching for what he’s writing for.

There are plenty of great articles on writing headlines aimed at search engine optimization, but whenever I bring it up, I don’t quite make the sale. He just doesn’t want to write for robots. I’m not a journalist — I’m an Internet professional. This is just the lay of the land, and some robots are benevolent.

So much of SEO is snake oil and hucksterism — once you follow some common sense best practices, the best thing you can do is produce content that people want to read and link to, and handle the one or two things in your control competently. One of those things is putting the darn keywords where the darn search engine can find them. But if you’d rather hang on to an artful headline, that’s what you’re missing out on.

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