Does that title suck or what?
You bet it does, but it would rank awesome for search engine traffic if that was what you were going for. People always search for things like “Top 10” or “Best whatever”. The problem is that everyone involved in building and designing websites knows that too.
Some web publishers will deliberately write articles for search terms and key phrases like these in order to generate maximum organic traffic. That is fine. There is nothing wrong with playing the game.
What I HATE though is unscrupulous websites who will title their articles like this, even when the article does not fulfill the title! Take this article which I have deliberately linked to in a way to be mostly worthless to the other site. The title of the article is “The World’s Best Dividend Stocks”, clearly an attempt to hit some solid keywords. Again, I have no problem with this IF the article meets the expectations of the title! This one does not.
Instead, this article is about the much more prosaic (and not searched on) topic that foreign companies also pay good dividends and that you should look at them too.
WHAT?!?!
In what way does that satisfy “The World’s Best Dividend Stocks”?
It doesn’t. Not at all.
If someone, say me, were looking for some international equities that have historically paid high dividends, I would be interested in an article with such a title, as that website knew I would. Of course, upon reading this “No duh” article, I have no additional information about the world’s best dividend paying stocks. All I know is that there are 3 US stocks were the “best” S&P 500 stocks for 50 years or so. Later, the author reports that 40% of foreign dividend paying stocks that trade on a US exchange have doubled in the past six years. And, that makes them the world’s best paying dividend stocks how? Is it the author’s contention that all the foreign dividend paying stocks that do not trade on a US exchange cannot be some of the world’s best dividend paying stocks, or is the author simply too lazy to find a tool that would allow him to research non-US stocks?
It gets worse.
The next section is about how foreign countries may tax your dividends. NOT IF YOU ARE BUYING THE STOCKS THAT TRADE ON A US EXHANGE!
Before Google came along, this article might have had a more accurate title, something along the lines of “Don’t Forget International Stocks When Looking For Dividends.” But, that has too many “stop words,” and way more people search for “Top Dividend Stocks” or “Best Dividend Stocks”, so the world’s thinnest connection to a title optimized for search engines will have to satisfy those who actually want information about international high yielding dividend stocks, which will be how I refine my search to exclude the shifty and banal results I got from my last search.