By: Malcolm Coles
Journalism has an unhappy history with SEO. Actually, all online content has an unhappy history with SEO.
Journalism has an unhappy history with SEO. Actually, all online content has an unhappy history with SEO.
SEO practitioners have sucked the life out of much online content – for whatever reason many writers have ended up having to concentrate on what is popular in search engines rather than what is interesting or important. Many writers have also got the idea that SEO involves stuffing keywords into their articles at the expense of great writing.
Profitability may mean that these two pressures never go away. But as a journalist, SEO doesn't have to mean you compromise what you do. It is just a way to make sure that your content has the best chance of being found by new readers.
So here is how search engines really work (I've used Google as the example throughout, although these principles apply to most search engines).
Types of search
When you search for something, what Google takes account of depends on what sort of results it thinks the searcher wants.
Google actually has more than one type of search result. Depending on what you type in, Google may show normal web results, news results, pictures, a video, a map and so on.
And this is about more than just the format of the content.
For instance, search for Six Nations in February (when the rugby competition is on), and Google will show news results at the top of its results page.
Search for the same words in August and no news results are shown. Because there are so many more searches in February, Google works out automatically that something newsy is happening then and so promotes news results. Come the summer, when few are searching, it goes back to just showing just web pages.
There is nothing you can do about how many people are searching. But you can do something about the factors that Google takes account of in deciding the order of its results. Read More....
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