VIDEO: Taylor Momsen Isn’t Wearing Pants!

It’s true! She’s not! Not in all these PHOTOS and VIDEOS of TAYLOR MOMSEN from GOSSIP GIRL who might know JUSTIN BIEBER! She’s not wearing pants! That’s totally a dress!

The SEO gods are thanking David Carr today after his SEO-headline-enabling look at SEO enabling headlines. Carr notes that Gossip Girl-star Momsen is very popular on the Internets, and that by employing the strategic mention of her name in a headline he can goose Google results for his story. And he’s right! Now the NYT is the top result for “Taylor Momsen” on Google, though of course it helps to publish via the New York Times, which does not have what one might call a puny web presence. (Actually, the NYT has the top two Google results — it also helps to link and link back on your site.)

Per Carr:

Headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative. Now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. In that context, “Jon Stewart Slams Glenn Beck” is the beau ideal of great headline writing. And both Twitter and Facebook have become republishers, with readers on the hunt for links with nice, tidy headlines crammed full of hot names to share with their respective audiences.

Keep in mind that all of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.”

Headlines are also all you need to read, so you can just skim the rest of the column. That’s why 12 hours after I first read this I’m just noticing now — and clearly before Carr or the NYT — that the last sentence above is missing a “said” after namechecking Gabe Snyder. Otherwise we’re not sure if Snyder is, himself, a naked little creature. But let us pause for a moment and imagine it.

It’s now déclassé to point out a typo in a post, and though Lord knows people do still love doing it with the NYT, everyone loves David Carr so I’m hardly scoring a point here. But I do find it amazing that no one caught that before now, since I saw Carr’s piece burning up Twitter last night (Peter Kafka, Ray Wert), and since lots of media people read Carr when he’s hot off the presses, and since, well, there is that whole top-result-on-Google thing.

So maybe there’s a sub-issue here beyond the new realities of SEO-baiting, and maybe it’s buried in this little nugget:

When I scan my list of aggregated articles in an RSS feed, looking for information that I seem to need to know right now, I am ruthless: the obscure, the off-beat, the mysterious, frequently go unclicked.

Wow. Harsh. And here I thought my “Obscure, Off-Beat, Mysterious Megan Fox Naked Photos” headline was a sure winner. But seriously — if you’re reading this far down, you’re probably an anomaly. Either you came here for TAYLOR MOMSEN PHOTOS AND VIDEOS — next page, Tweens — or you are consuming this along with an encyclopedia’s worth of content this Monday morning, on a range of topics including but not limited to Elena Kagan, the Upfronts, why Glee hates Newsweek, why the rest of you hate Newsweek, the midterms, the Montreal Canadiens, Miss USA 2010 Rima Fakih, Iron Man 2 vs. Russell Crowe in Tights, and GM posting its first profit in 3 years following a 40% rise in sales. And also, Glee! So Lordy, who has time to read all the way through this thing? Or, anything?

Some do, sure, but more don’t. Thanks to Twitter, I know about a lot more out there and read a lot less. That could just be a function of my job, where processing information in the aggregate is an essential skill, or it could because there’s so much more out there, or it could be because I am very lazy. Whatever it is, I don’t flatter myself that I am unique and special where online news consumption is concerned, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that the skim-factor is not only alive and well in the Internet age, but has also been refined to almost a science.

(Sidebar: It’s sort of amazing that in all the coverage of the Newsweek sale, the only consistently positive words I’ve really seen have been for the Newsweek Tumblr, which is a pithy and interesting aggregator of pithy and interesting content, largely from…Newsweek. Is there no bridge between the two?)

So: Do I agree with David Carr that “people who worry that Web headlines dumb down public discourse are probably right?” No — on the contrary, smarter SEO-savvy web headlines may be responsible for propping it up, if even the WSJ and WaPo (and the NYT!) are getting their presumably-still-very-highbrow content in front of the faces of the click-and-skimmers. But Carr is both too modest here, and misses an essential point: He’s too modest because he fails to allow that “Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline” is a good headline on its own, even for someone reading it in — gasp — newsprint; and he misses the essential point that public discourse isn’t necessarily happening around SEO headlines in the first place. Carr laments the dying old New York Observer-style headline, but that doesn’t mean the Observer has disappeared — on the contrary, when there is news to be broken from it, it breaks, like the David Shuster-CNN revelation a few weeks back. (And, it must be noted, that headline had a typo in it!)

SEO headlines are not meant to capture intelligent viewers, they are meant to capture search terms — but I’m with Politico’s Jim Brady who says that they “reject the idea that there are only two options, between a really creative and a boring headline.” Newspapers have been tailoring their headlines for years, to fit into the far-less-flexible tyranny of allotted column inches. “Headless Body in Topless Bar” could well have been the result of some heartless editor slashing down “MURDER! Decapitated Corpse Discovered Amidst Bare Bouncing Breasts In Filthy Underground Sex-Den!” which has its own sort of charm. (NB: It’s also very important to italicize “MURDER!” there.)

Point being, the discourse is alive and well? Er, yes, something like that (to quote Nick Denton: “The staples of old yellow journalism are the staples of the new yellow journalism: sex; crime; and, even better, sex crime”). More to the fact that, I do believe that people are still reading the good stuff. Not all the good stuff, and not all the people. But still, it’s getting there — and if it’s really good, then you can take your SEO and you know what you can do with it.

Or not. Because maybe thanks to a good SEO headline, one more person will read that good stuff — not skim, read — and maybe that’ll get it on one more Tumblr or one more retweet. And maybe from there it can do battle with Justin Bieber trending daily on Twitter — or maybe not, because the people making Justin Bieber trend on Twitter in the first place really don’t care about your silly news story. Maybe. Who knows? Either way, Google will be there, sitting in judgment.

So: that’s why I don’t really care that this headline has nothing to do with the content of this article. Those of you who came here for videos of pantsless Taylor Momsen — I’ve delivered. Those of you who came here because you thought I might have something smart to say — well, let’s hope I’ve rewarded your skimming with something to think about.

Now, kneel before the Gods of SEO, people! Kneel!

Yeah. You know how it’s done.

Here’s one of the promised videos:

>>>For more EXCLUSIVE VIDEOS AND PHOTOS OF TAYLOR MOMSEN! click through to the NEXT PAGE!

(Yes, I really have them. I shot ’em in April 2009 at The Annex on the Lower East Side in what I believe was her first NYC performance. She’s pretty good, too. I knew they’d come in handy someday. Now click.)