A journalist's view of Wordtracker's course on search engine marketing essentials by Rachelle Money, 10 June 2008

Wordtracker sent me on a two-day course called Search Engine Marketing Essentials. In this article I want to tell you how useful I found it from a journalist’s perspective and what I think newspapers should be doing online.

I made my way to London to take my place on a two-day course on Search Engine Marketing, where I rubbed shoulders with Wordtracker’s clients and mentors. My class of 12 were a pretty mixed bag - novice SEOs, marketers, entrepreneurs and web designers sat eagerly scribbling down important points given by our tutors, Ken McGaffin (Wordtracker’s chief marketing officer) and Sally Kavanagh (SEO and web analytics expert). At various times we shot our hands up in the air like rather old school children when we floundered in terminology or unfamiliar rhetoric.

I was the only journalist there and naturally took the most notes, but how much did I really understand? Admittedly there were moments when I felt lost especially when people spoke knowledgeably about Google algorithms, robot text files or latent semantic indexing, and so on. However, the bits I didn’t understand were thankfully few and far between when considering the volume of work we got through in two days. When we arrived in the lecturing room we were each met by a great doorstopper of a ring binder, stuffed to the gunnels with papers on why keywords matter, link building, spam filters, how to build content, online Public Relations, and the intimacies of Google.

As a journalist it was interesting to hear that creative and technical industries are all having to share knowledge. People who run websites are having to think more about how to become better writers and attract press attention to their business. On the other hand, journalists are having to look to the web savvy for guidance on how to tackle the beast of the internet. We come from very different worlds but our aim is the same - we all want our content to get good search engine rankings and encourage more traffic.

One of the first principles we were introduced to was the kinds of copywriters there are. The most advantageous of positions to be in is to write copy with words which are being searched for. This kind of keyword rich content will get online traffic and revenue flowing.

This got me thinking about the ways in which I write. How can I improve my writing skills for the web? During the course we had a discussion about how to utilize extensive keywords by using the Wordtracker tool. This is a way of building up a rich cluster of keywords to pepper online content with. I asked how I would go about writing a keyword rich news article on Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Most ‘house styles’ or newspaper styles would use Gordon Brown’s full name in the first instance but then afterwards always refer to him as Brown. McGaffin advised that by using Brown with other prominent keywords such as Prime Minister, premiere, leader etc, then Google rankings won’t be harmed. These related keywords are known as a cluster.

This gave me a good insight into how I could structure articles to make them come higher on Google. Sometimes journalists are so obsessed with writing with the print reader in mind, we forget a lot of stories are read online by those searching for stories through Google. This is also true of sub-editors who are given the task of writing headlines. I’ve seen them wrestle with a myriad of words - some are discarded because they won’t fit in the allocated sized box on screen.

When it comes to online newspapers many, too many in fact, think copying and pasting headlines with puns and metaphors onto their online copies is OK. In SEO terms this is breaking all the rules. For a start, Google isn’t human. It’s not going to snort or guffaw at a funny pun, instead it will drive the story down the rankings because it won’t make the connection that a story relates to a particular keyword, especially when no keywords can be found in the most prominent places. At this point in the course I began to realize just how far the media world, especially print journalism, needs to come if it is to survive a bursting marketplace of online news and information.

Revelations came thick and fast and it wasn’t just me who was learning something new. One attendee, who had extensive experience in online marketing, said he had a ‘light bulb moment’ when we heard how there was little point of having a company website on advertising billboards because so few people would search for it in that way. People today go directly to search engines for information. What is more important is the call-to-action marketing messages.

Others expressed relief they had been carrying out search engine marketing strategies in the right way. We found many were self-taught and eager to use new ideas to get one step ahead of competitors. I heard one man, who runs four online businesses, say he had no idea the capacity of the Wordtracker tool even though he had been a user for 18 months. Talking to others on the course the feedback was overwhelmingly positive with many walking away with a lengthy ‘to do list’.

For me, it opened my eyes as to what direction journalists need to be heading in. It also confirmed that to succeed on the web doesn’t mean you have to compromise your writing style, which has always been a concern of mine. It was a real surprise to hear that Google only looks part way down the copy, particularly for someone who writes ‘drop leads’ or lengthy introductions to features which can be a few paragraphs long and without primary keywords. When Kavanagh said that ideally only 600 words should be shown on the screen, I shot up in my chair and with worry in my voice, asked her: “But what about the 3,000 word feature I may write? Does Google just ignore them?”

As the room started to fill with suggestions I was quickly satisfied that there were ways around it. Someone said that a feature could maintain its length by splitting the article into separate pages and the reader would have to click through to the next page to continue reading. McGaffin gave some advice which would utilize design as a means of making the feature article more search engine friendly. By using keywords in the H1 tags, having pull-out quotes near the top of the page, and a sidebar with the main points from the article which are keyword rich. He also suggested having good quality and relevant links on the page which search engines will recognize. McGaffin also suggested that lengthy articles could be put into PDFs which have high design quality (like newspapers) and also the opportunity for photography, which is very often integral to feature articles.

I felt a deep sigh of relief. Hoorah! My writing style doesn’t have to be offered up to the God of Search Engine as a sacrifice.

Looking back on my experience I would say that I have learnt more about why some websites fail miserably at executing these principles. Without naming names I can see why some newspapers are drowning on Page 6 or 7 of Google because they aren’t using very simple methods and design skills to get top search engine rankings. It seems ridiculous to me that there are so many businesses out there desperately searching for content to put on their websites, and yet newspapers have an abundance of copy but don’t know how to make it work for them online.

Now that I’ve learned about Search Engine Marketing I feel that if I were to walk into a room full of newspaper editors today I would be able to offer up some tips on how to make content more search engine friendly. Over and above what I have already discussed, here’s some additional points I’d tell them:

1. Links are very important for search engine rankings, but where they are positioned is just as important as what site they link to. Links should be given throughout the body of the text rather than listed on a side bar, which many newspapers do.

2. Get good and relevant outbound links from government sites, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and sites where there is lots of activity and a community buzz.

3. It’s also a good idea to interlink with related stories. By providing links to archive stories search engine rankings improve.

4. At the end of each article make highly visible links to social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon. This provides not only outbound links but also an opportunity for stories to be shared across a wide variety of mediums.

5. Some newspapers are starting to underline keywords in a different color so as to make it easier for readers to scan the page. Maybe this is something more newspapers should do?

Go to Online Journalism to read more of Rachelle's articles. And for more information on link-building, have a look at the following: Father of Link Building, Eric Ward Reveals His Secrets, Link Building Mindset and 10 Ways To Building Inbound Links.