SEO strategies
May 1st, 2008 by Bryan
Image via Wikipedia
Update: Mindy McAdams comments more on the headline strategy.
MediaShift’s Mark Glaser offers up a list of tips for increasing search engine traffic to your web site. If you’re not familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), this is a pretty decent place to start.
A couple of Glaser’s points stick out for college media: Links and headlines.
Links
As Glaser (and countless others, including myself) notes, hyperlinks increase your search engine “weight.” That’s a good reason to link to other stories within your site, and also out to other authoritative sources as often as possible. Glaser quotes Kevin Anderson of the Guardian UK:
“One of the things that drives Google rank is links, both internal and external,” said Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at the Guardian. “Blogging is all about linking, although any good web journalism should be. When I’m being honest, as a journalist and blogger, I’ll admit that blogs have higher Google rank than sites with similar traffic based on the high level of linking…It’s one of those slightly counter-intuitive things that traditional journalists and media managers don’t seem to understand. Linking is not only good web journalism, it’s also good for SEO, hence site visibility.”
Headlines
Web headlines should focus on keywords at the beginning of the head, Glaser writes. Search engines place more emphasis on keywords that appear there. This means fewer cryptic, tabloid-esque headlines, but greater visibility for your content. In short, it’s okay to be cool in print, but give us the straight head on the web.
Too often, web headlines are just the print headline copied and pasted (”shovelheads”?) into the CMS. Allowing web producers to rewrite the heads for the web site helps your SEO and it also gives them valuable training in writing headlines on their own.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Rewriting print headlines for the web is a no-brainer. Print headlines work in print as they are surrounded with context. Headlines online need to live on their own and make sense as stand-alone text. When I was at the BBC News website, we learnt that headlines were key to enticing readers to click on a story. I am surprised that some editors still debate whether to re-write headlines for the web.