‘Super Cali Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious’ – what a mouthful! This is one of the most well-known puns printed in the last decade and helped The Sun to shift more copies than it bargained for after a superior Inverness Caledonian Thistle side beat a woeful Celtic team 3 – 1 in the Scottish Cup, February 2000. Although winning widespread critical acclaim and kudos for creating a sharp, witty and memorable headline, such a title would prove to be useless for a news publisher today looking to get their story increased online exposure on a prominent search engine such as Google or Yahoo!.

The importance of titles cannot be underestimated in search engine optimisation. The print industry is having to adopt SEO measures into their stories to generate revenue in a trade which has been badly crippled by falling advertising revenue and an influx of third-rate bloggers. Page impressions are now as important as the money generated from subscriptions and shelf price, and unless journalists fall in line then the time spent writing their reports will effectively have been wasted as they will sink into an online abyss.

Cheryl Cole is an excellent SEO example. As one of the UK’s most publicised celebrities, most browsers looking for key up-to-date gossip and information on the split between Cheryl and her husband, Ashley, will be scrambling across the internet for instant breaking news, feverishly searching Google for the latest updates and gossip. Keywords on most people’s minds will be entirely subject-related. Think along the lines of ‘Ashley Cole Cheryl Cole Divorce’, or ‘Cheryl Cole Marriage Split’.

An online news agency will therefore need to adjust their titles to accommodate these search habits. Many journalists have cleverly incorporated the title of Cheryl’s debut number one single into her personal life – headlines triumphantly shouting that ‘Cheryl will no longer fight for this love’. Though it may look boring, a headline such as ‘Cheryl Cole to divorce husband Ashley’ will fare much better than its rivals and generate more traffic than its wittier counterpart.

It doesn’t mean the death of the pun by any means – it can easily be inserted into the strap as a lead to the story. But for the news agency wishing to build a stronger readership with search engine optimization, they simply won’t be ‘Aloud’ to lead with cutting remarks online.

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