Making a strong first impression – on readers and search bots

A post's headline and generally its first 25 words appear in search indexes, as well as on subscription feeds, aggregator sites and social-media links. Seed this canvas with the strongest material possible: news angles, dynamic prose, original reporting, etc. It's the bait on your hook.

Subscribers and regular readers aside, winning attention can be even more challenging online than in print. Someone perusing, say, a hard copy of Nutcracker Collector Monthly or Wise Widgeter Digest already has enough interest in a topic to seek out a publication on it (or pick one off the doctor's waiting room table). The audience self-selects to a great degree and often pays money for the privilege, upping its stake in consumption of that media. So magazine and newspaper writers often preach to the choir.

Fishers on the ocean of free Internet content need to be more crafty.

As we discussed last week, search engines send spider bots to crawl the web, analyzing domain names, keywords, inbound and outbound links, and 190-something other mysterious factors to determine a page's point ... and also its authority, called PageRank in the Googleverse. Various techniques exist to boost SEO (search engine optimization).

The higher your PageRank, the higher your site appears when people search. And if your first impression is compelling, they click through and read. The same goes for folks perusing feeds, Facebook links or fecklessly skimming spamtastic linkfarms.

Wow 'em. Hard and fast.

For the bots, touch upon keywords – the terms that really sum up the gist of a post. Don't stuff them in, but if you're reviewing the Big Book of Biscuits, don't lead with 250 words on your grandfather's favorite cookie-making apron. That's called "burying the lede" in media jargon.

People-wise, be precise and colorful, emphasizing the original (language and material). Avoid word repetition between the headline and first paragraph. Those 35-ish words together are the post's ambassador and advert alike. Make every one count.

Blog posts deserve snappy ledes (starts)

Think elevator pitch. Think love at first sight. Because you have mere seconds to engage readers' attention with the "lede" of a story: the first sentence (or paragraph. And yes, the misspelling's intentional, differentiating from the hot metal printers employed in the last century. But you'll also see "lead" referring to a tale's kickoff.)

Good story starts are tough to write, but worth the struggle. As Poynter's Chip Scanlan points out: "[a lede] makes a promise to the reader or viewer: I have something important, something interesting, to tell you. A good lead beckons and invites. It informs, attracts, and entices. If there's any poetry in journalism, it's most often found in the lead, as in the classic opening of what could have been a mundane weather forecast: 'Snow, followed by small boys on sleds.'"

Blogs, in particular, need to charm quickly, making ledes all the more critical. As noted above, aggregators excerpt those first 25 words: they are a post's calling card to the world, scrutinized by potential readers and search spiders alike. And, of course, readers haven't even invested spare change for a newspaper, $10 for a movie ticket or $30 for a hardback with a bestseller seal of approval. They have clicked upon your site – possibly an unknown site – for free and can just as easily click away to someone else's.

But a good lede pulls them in and entices them to stay. And the best can even survive the erosion of time, as writer John Barth reminds us: “A first sentence’s job is to draw its reader into the sentence after it – while at the same time, maybe establishing the tale’s tone and narrative viewpoint . . . some do that job so well that they remain in our memory long after we’ve forgotten most of the words that followed.”

Art: Children on sleds in Central Park, New York City, Bain News Service, c.a.1915. This image is available on Wikimedia Commons from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID cph.3c11106.

Lively lede devices for bloggers (and other authors)

Focus your thoughts before beginning. What tone is appropriate for the article: lively, dry and newsy, dreamy and erudite? What's the target audience? What are the key points? The gist of the article?

Now bait your hook. You need a scene – or language – arresting enough to capture readers attention. Some tried and true techniques:

• Action: studies reveal that reader like to see characters and even things in motion. Focus on active, evocative verbs, not passive constructions.
• Be challenging: shake up what folks think they know. Reveal something new, whether that's a better ad revenue model or tips for a silkier showdog coat...
• Dilemma: Introduce a problem that the characters – or reader or society – need to solve.
• Emotion: Stir up empathy or revulsion or anger, then unravel the narrative or intellectual arguments.
• In media res: Latin for "in the middle the things". Drop the reader into a scene, then spool out the backstory before proceeding on the journey.
• Quest: Humans are hardwired to learn from the experiences of others, as we discussed week two. Curious situations rivet us and excite the rubberneck impulse. A quest takes that a step further, tapping one of our great plot archetypes: hero overcomes obstacles, wins reward. (Aristotle boiled all tales down to seven categories: quest, voyage and return, rebirth, comedy, tragedy, overcoming the monster and rags to riches, as Peter Reeves points out here.)
• Running joke: make with the funny. And keep the humor weaving through the post, evolving.
• Senses: stretch beyond the obvious (sight) and engage readers on other levels. Be precise. Don't say "sweet smell," when you can specify the "musk of old orchids" or the "scent of sun-warmed cedar".
• Suspense: Intrigue can involve a reader in a story. Bewilderment, however, is a harder sell. Give the audience enough framework to follow, but enough mystery to continue following...
• Universal stories: Emphasize the elements readers are most likely to share.

Weak lede techniques to avoid

• Burying the lede: Chief among journalistic sins, this denotes putting the good stuff low in the story, rather than up front as bait. Given search-bot behavior, it's even more critical to write important details into the top of a post. Those concerned about SEO should work in keywords also.
• Clichés: They don't engage the reader with a familiar device. They bore them with it. So no dark and stormy nights, unless you follow up with some riveting and immediate twist.
• Hypotheticals: Long convoluted "if, then" clauses slow the pace of the text and reverse into the point. Also, they encourage readers to skip ahead, should the scenario not speak immediately to them. Be especially wary of anticipating how people might feel or react: that can insult and alienate an audience. Captivate readers with strong plots and prose: don't try to artificially inject them into the action.
  
• Second person: Like "if" clauses, the second-person pronoun "you" promises to involve the reader in the story. But many editors consider this such a cheap, blatant ploy that they ban it. Just sayin'...
• Stalling: The material at the start of a sentence – or especially a paragraph – has greater prominence. Don't fill that key space with dates, subclauses or padded out verbs of being, like "there are" and "it may be".
• Thinking out loud: Save your musing for later in the piece. Or rather, don't ask the readers to watch you ponder until you've already nabbed their attention with the topic in question.

Plenty of world-class writers break these guidelines routinely, sure. But until your writing's world-class and has a devoted audience, it's worth learning the tricks, then deciding which to discard in certain circumstances.