The Wordtracker Academy

With every search you make on Google, you are given suggestions for alternative related searches. Nick Usborne recommends using these related searches as ideas for new content on your site.

The calendar is packed full of special days from Martin Luther King Day to, er, Talk Like A Pirate Day and Superman's birthday. Nick Usborne shows you how to use special days to make special content your readers will like and share.

In part one of SEO for editorial teams, journalists and writers, we looked at how quality editorial is at the heart of building the links SEO requires. In part two, Mark Nunney looks at how they can help promote their quality content to make sure it gets the precious links it deserves and needs for search engines success.

In this first of a two-part guide to SEO for editorial teams and journalists, Mark Nunney introduces editors to the basics of SEO and gives a step-by-step process that puts editorial at the heart of your SEO.

Brent D Payne, as the Tribune Company’s in-house Director of Search Engine Optimization (and bald SEO legend), has managed a 20 million increase in monthly visits to its websites, including the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. Payne tells Rachelle Money how these spectacular results have been achieved, including using keyword research to help give readers “the news we know they want”.

In Wordtracker's last Online Journalism article I posed the question of whether readers would be prepared to pay for stories online and the response was a very loud NO! But the days of free are numbered and despite the seemingly reticent position of many readers, the momentum is beginning to build towards a variety of pay models such as subscriptions, micropayments or pay walls. We take a look at what newspapers and publishers are doing to get money from online content.

Newspapers are struggling to find a new business model for their online editions. Some have folded at the challenge and packed up the printing presses while others have thrown up pay walls. The only question editors want the answer to is, are readers prepared to pay for online content?

How do journalists learn about SEO? Many of them will Google the term to find out what it's all about and how it will impact on their writing skills. When looking at the kind of advice there is for journalists online, it seems clear that many commentators from the journalistic side of the fence misconstrue what SEO is about, while SEOs themselves seem to be clueless about what journalists actually do, and about what writing responsibilities they have.

Since using the Wordtracker keyword research tool Dan Roberts says Hearst Publication's online traffic has grown 150%. Hearst publishes 15 of the world's most popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Oprah's O Magazine, and Good Housekeeping as well as five web-only magazines. We talked to Roberts, Senior SEO Analyst for Hearst Publications' Digital Media team. As a former print journalist he knows all too well the challenges of introducing SEO and keyword research to a traditional media platform. And thank goodness he did.

Search engine optimization (SEO) makes journalists groan. They bristle at the idea of ‘stuffing keywords’ into their copy while managers who often don’t understand SEO are desperate for the extra traffic good search rankings could bring. But the truth is that there are many parallels between SEO and journalistic writing and that SEO really can be a journalist’s best friend. Rachelle Money explains.

We're starting a new project to explore the role keyword research and search engine optimization can play in online journalism.

Journalists of all types are being asked to learn how to write for the web. I traveled to London in September for a two-day course 'Writing for the Web' run by the British Broadcasting Corporation. So just what are people being taught about the web?

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.

In journalism, the question of how print reconciles itself with the challenges online news has brought is a hotly debated topic. In our new blog on online journalism we will be joining the conversation and looking at what newspapers are doing to grab online readers, but first here's an introduction to what you can expect from the blog.