Start with your headlines and stand the old journalism class dicta on their heads.

Abandon active voice. Go for the subject of the story. Spend the topic, immediately, and buy reader attention. Your subject is the gold with which reader attention is purchased.

Thank you, Jakob Nielsen for laying out the facts on this one. J school profs taught excellent steam-ship era information design when they demanded active-voice headlines and denigrated the passive voice.

This is the Web, not a steamship.

Headlines succeed or fail in their first two to four words.

Because readers don't read on the Web. They scan, and they want to know what the piece is about.

They make read-or-leave decisions in less than a heartbeat.

Tell them what they need to know as quickly, efficiently and honestly as possible.

Or your site, business model and livelihood are headed for the graveyard to be interred.

Yes. Front-load:

Put the subject first, get some reader attention and live.

Verbs later, or never.

This is a battle for reader attention, not one of the various English classes I have taught. The fine points of grammar are not everything and in many cases they are not anything. Articles (a, and, the) for example -- use them only as absolutely required.

When you get around to writing the first sentence or two of the story, remember search: use old keywords.

Users will see them, if you've gotten a couple of potential readers past the headline, and they'll know what they're reading about. And that's a comfort. So they're more likely to keep reading. Meanwhile, searchers use the first keywords that come to mind, and those are the "old" ones.

Yes, you front-load the story as well.

Use lede-summary, inverted-pyramid style -- something the jschool profs got exactly right: who, what, when, where, why and how in a short, punchy sentence or two, followed by well-structured paragraphs of detail that build one upon another.

Your readers will not thank you. They will bless you with their attention, and you can continue to live indoors.

No, that isn't all. Use outbound links. They're a service readers both expect and appreciate.

Examples abound in this blog entry, albeit not in a great many of the online publications I frequent.

As Amy Gahran wrote at Poynter:

In online media, relevant links are always a service. In fact, if you mention something in a story for which you could include a relevant direct link and fail to do so, you're probably only going to frustrate and eventually alienate your online audience.

Yet outbound links are rarely found in shrinking online publications I frequent.

Doomed online publications I will miss, if they will not adopt standard, Web-wise writing and presentation practices.

It is merely a matter of online life or death.

Reading the Washington Post, I bopped a San Francisco link amid a description of John Gilmore, and was dumped onto a Bay Area mishmash.

Because links take their meaning from context, offering an opportunity to learn more about the subject at hand, I felt misled.

Washington Post Staff Writer Ellen Nakashima was focused on "civil liberties activist" John Gilmore at that point in the story -- not on Bay Area news in general, current SF blogs or tourism-related WaPo.com SF articles. Yet that was the topic mismash amid which I landed.

Gilmore just happens to hail from San Francisco, and I wanted to know more about his current activities.

So, having been burned, I read straight through to the end of the story, and went to Google. Did my own search (pout).

Repeat encounters with similar pages at WashingtonPost.com have left me wary of following any of their in-story links.

The reporter didn't do it. That San Francisco/psudo-gilmore link page was generated by the cunning technologies of Inform Technologies LLC, as were the others I subsequently encountered.

Inform services are fascinating, as are those of apparent competitors (at least in some regards), like Moreover and Topix. Even so, it is Inform that has moved Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive CEO Caroline Little to wax rhapsodic that the service "keeps readers engaged longer, drives more traffic, and ultimately helps us make more money."

Thus she offers Inform as almost the Holy Grail of add-on information services.

Good for them.

Even so, links like San Francisco amid the John Gilmore text are not what I mean when I write about the importance of off-site links to the success of online publications.

Meaningful outward-facing links, which help enlighten the reader about the subject of concern, are important.

Unintentional misdirection of the sort I encountered while reading about John Gilmore is self-destructive for online publications.

I say "unintentional" because I am after some research persuaded that no one intended to send me off on a wild San Francisco goose chase.

Even unintentional misdirection undermines user confidence in the misdirecting publication, leading longtime readers like myself to think twice before clicking any in-story link posted by the offending publication.

Clearing up my misgivings may require more than a tune-up of the configuration, if anyone seeks to clear them up.

I'll be watching, almost every day. Having read the Washington Post for decades and having followed its online efforts since the days of Digital Ink, I'm not giving up on them. Or on their partners.