Online journalism and SEO project - an introduction by Rachelle Money, 23 January 2009

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

Specifically, we’ll explore what’s driving publishers to improve their search engine rankings and how the resulting initiatives can often receive a poor reaction from professional journalists. Our audience includes both online journalists and online publishers and we’ll be looking for and reviewing the best websites in this area, We’ll find out where the debates are happening and take part in them. We will create quality content around the keywords and the issues that are important to this audience. We will particularly focus on how the worlds of journalism and search engine optimization are growing ever closer in a series of articles. We want to use our expertise in all things SEO to show our readers how to get top notch rankings.

It's a strange situation that journalists have found themselves in. Speaking as one, I think I am in a position to mull over the seismic changes made in the industry recently, and on what impact the realization of a digital future is having on us. With Wordtracker's help I have launched a blog dedicated to online journalism, which is currently ranked around 125 out of 4 million in Google for the term "online journalism". Not great I know, but then I haven't exactly got hundreds of pages on the site. At Wordtracker we plan to increase that ranking to bring it to the top of the Google results by practicing what we preach. We plan to show how producing quality content for the blog, optimizing it, building links with other quality websites, and organizing the site in a way which is attractive to the search engines, will push our rankings towards the top.

We are going to concentrate on building quality content which is useful for an audience concerned with the current state of print media, and one who wants to know how SEO and keyword research will benefit their online publication.

Competing on Google

As a journalist, the idea that I should compete to reach the top of Google has made me think about how newspapers do the same thing. What kind of obstacles are ahead of them when there are thousands of other similar websites, producing the same news stories for an audience that is increasingly promiscuous with where they get their information from? It's a tough one to reconcile, but that's exactly what newspaper editors and their managers are trying to do. The situation is dire and time is everything when you have an entire industry on its knees. A melodramatic statement? I think not. . .

For quite some time now print media (publishers, newspapers, magazines) have been told that advertising revenue is down and circulation figures are tumbling; poor sales figures have lead to staff cuts and harsh cost-savings measures. Newsrooms have been cut to the bone and in some cases it's now eating through the marrow. Bosses try to reverse the downturn in revenue by hiking up prices, which means more people are turned off from buying newspapers, and instead read online. This just feeds the vicious circle, however, and we're back to square one.

How can editors ensure their newspaper articles are the ones people are reading online, and safeguard their publication's readership? Having a website with flash interactive graphics, online video players, podcasts, blogs and slideshows isn't enough. More needs to be done. A more concerted effort is needed to help journalists use keyword research and search engine optimization when writing their articles, so that search engines reward that site with good rankings. Some newspapers already do that to some extent with in-house SEOs, as we'll discover in our case study with Hearst Magazines, but it's still treated with suspicion by some journalists.

Job losses in the news industry

Let me put some of this apparent turmoil in the industry into some kind of perspective.

The McClatchy Company, the third largest US newspaper publisher, announced plans in June to cut its workforce by around 10% due to a "difficult advertising market", which equated to 1,400 jobs being lost. McClatchy's own major titles such as The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, and The Kansas City Star.

They weren't the only ones that ran into trouble this year. In August the United States' largest publisher Gannett Co Inc announced they would have to cut around 1,000 jobs from its 84 local newspapers around the US because of declining advertising and circulation revenue.

The New York Times cut 100 newsroom jobs, then the LA Times had their third round of job losses in a year with 75 posts being cut (in 2001 they had 1,200 staff—today it's just 650).

Seattle Times cut 200 jobs, Baltimore Sun cut 100 and The Tribune Company in Chicago filed for bankruptcy protection in early December.

The UK didn't fair much better this year—80 jobs were culled from the Express, Channel 4 cut 150, The Financial Times axed 60 jobs, Trinity Mirror froze pay rises on all 1,200 staff members, Daily Mail cut 400 jobs, BBC Scotland news and current affairs team cut 70, and at the Glasgow Herald (one of the world's oldest continuously published English newspaper, founded in 1783) more than 200 staff were issued redundancy notices and asked to reapply for their jobs.

It doesn't make for great reading does it? In almost every announcement of job cuts newspapers have claimed that advertising sales, and a hostile economic climate, have lead to these culls. That's why so much emphasis is now being placed online, where many think revenue from advertising sales is likely to be more buoyant.

A positive role for SEO

There is an emerging group of SEO practitioners who wish to impart their knowledge on how journalists should use SEO to write keyword rich content for their online editions. However, there's a lot of crap out there too which is so bad it's entertaining.

Take Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian newspaper in the UK.

He has a real linguistic swagger in his writing which means he enjoys a cult following for his outspoken ways, and he doesn't disappoint with his grumblings about SEO in an article which carries the headline: "Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it."

He completely misconstrues SEO as "the journalistic equivalent of a classified ad" in what is an amusing article, but it's worrying to think that Brooker who is a professional journalist, broadcaster for the BBC and film director could get it so wrong!

Others simply regurgitate the same information over and over again on a number of websites: don't use puns in headlines, make sure the most important information is put at the front of the title tag, a keyword rich introduction, blah blah blah.

The guidance given to journalists on SEO is at best almost correct, with many people missing the point or giving confusing advice. In our online journalism series we hope to rectify that imbalance of knowledge and give clearer, more definitive answers to journalists who are moving from print to online writing.

Throughout this series we are going to explore a number of issues through some special articles:

The good, the bad and the ugly advice available to journalists on the subject of SEO on the internet (vis-à-vis Charlie Brooker et al).

We are also going to pick apart the processes of keyword research and how it will help journalists when writing an article for publication on the web. Why is SEO important and what are the benefits?

We'll discuss the parallels between SEOs and journalists — just how far apart are the two professions? I think many will be surprised at how they share the same goals and objectives — to be read by as wide a readership as possible.

How can keyword research and Wordtracker's new tool, Keyword Questions, influence journalistic content?

What is a sub-editor? How are these roles changing with this new digital era? What do they do and what expertise can they bring to online publications that need to optimize their content?

What do journalists really think of SEO?

How will keyword research change the writing and production of a story? We take a retrospective look at a piece of journalism that could have benefited from some SEO, in a case study on how journalists at Hearst Magazines use keyword research across their publications. We talk to Dan Roberts, senior SEO analyst for Hearst's digital media outlets.

Did we get to number one or thereabouts? How far have the Wordtracker principals of keyword research and search engine optimization gotten us in terms of rankings?

This is a great opportunity to get deeper into the subject of online journalism and how SEO and keyword research can and will influence the media industry. It is commonly thought that SEO will compromise a journalist's work, that it will override their own use of words in favor of more popular ones. We need to demystify SEO through intelligent discussion, and illustrate how it can become a journalist's greatest ally as they come to realize their future in an industry which is quickly moving away from traditional print toward online.

You'll find a selection of Rachelle's articles on Online Journalism on this Wordtracker Academy online journalism page.