Search engine optimisation (SEO) is not part of a journalist’s traditional skill set.
In fact, there are probably some journalists who don’t know what it is. And those that do know what it is probably think it has to do with the dark arts of marketing.
They would be right – there’s a lot of marketing thinking in SEO. But there are also good reasons for journalists to establish a nodding acquaintance with some basic SEO techniques. Stories written by journalists (or bloggers, or marketers) live online, and you want people to be able to find them – if only for reasons of ego.
But the Internet is a very, very big place – and there’s no guarantee that a reader will find your article about (say) a protest outside a local high school instead of someone else’s.
The good news is that there are some really simple things you can do to increase the chances that your article will rise to the top of the Google pond.
Here’s your guide on how to do that:
BACKGROUND
First, it helps to understand the various ways in which a reader might find your story online. Here’s a breakdown of what are loosely called “traffic sources” (traffic is the total number of “clicks” on your website or article):
Referral: Traffic that occurs when a user finds you through a site other than a major search engine (for example, when someone links to your story about the protest from their own blog article).
Social: Traffic from a social network, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.
Organic: Traffic from search engine results that is not paid for (a reader searches in Google on “high school protest” and they find your article).
Paid search: Traffic from search engine results that is the result of paid advertising via Google AdWords or another paid search platform (your publication pays Google to boost articles on the website)
Email: Traffic from email marketing (for example a newsletter).
Direct: Any traffic where the referrer or source is unknown.
(Source: The Difference Between Direct and Organic Website Traffic Sources)
SEO STEP ONE: KEYWORDS
In this article we are talking about organic traffic: ways in which a search term typed into a search engine will produce a set of results.
Now, there are whole companies of people who devote their lives to trying to discern the methods by which search engines decide which articles to display – how Google will rank one story about a high school protest as more worthy of display than another.
This is a highly complex field, but one of the major factors in understanding rankings is the all-important concept of the keyword. To put this in its most basic form: if a reader types “high school protest” into Google, the mysterious algorithms inside the search engine will scan the internet, looking for content that has that exact phrase. If the phrase is buried at the bottom of 1000 words, Google will in all probability not “see” that story. Therefore, place the keyword phrase high school protest in the headline or in the first one or two paragraphs.
From a hard news journalism point of view, this is something that will happen naturally: if you are writing about a high school protest, those words will inevitably be at the top of the story (unless you are a really bad writer!).
From the point of view of headline writers, however, a paradigm shift is needed. The time-honoured tradition of the “clever” headline is not very helpful. Complex puns and erudite references mean very little to Google, sadly. To give another example, if you are publishing a set of five ice cream recipes, a print headline like “Five ways to chill this summer” is not going to tell Google to show your article to the reader who searched for ice cream recipes (though it does work on a print page where a reader can see immediately that they are looking at recipes). A much better headline for SEO purposed would be: Five ice cream recipes to keep you cool this summer. (And would of course make sense for the person who is only seeing the headline in a set of search results).
SEO STEP TWO: PICTURES
It’s important to remember that search engines are not very good at understanding images. The picture accompanying a story is a mystery to Google (artificial intelligence means this is an evolving field, but it’s best to assume the machine is not very bright). But a search engine can “read” the file name of the picture, the words in the caption and the “alt text”. Let’s break that down:
- If this is something under your control (ie not done by another department), always change the file name of the picture to language. So rather than a file name like WhatsApp Image 2020-10-29 at 4.49.02 PM.jpg, change the file name to Police at high school protest. jpg.
- The caption for the picture should contain the keyword, if possible. Rather than: Police surround the school in Joan Bloggs street, say Police surround the high school in Joan Bloggs street, in anticipation of a protest by XXX political party.
- Alt text is “the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers”. If the content management system you use allows it, always write something meaningful in the alt text field. In the first place, you are helping visually impaired readers (who will hear the alt text). In the second place, your alt text gives you one more opportunity to tell search engines what your story is about. So rather than leaving the alt text blank, or typing “police at protest”, use your alt text to say: Police erect barricades at high school protest.
(Definition of alt text above from this really good article: Image Alt Text: What It Is, How to Write It, and Why It Matters to SEO
SEO STEP THREE: LINKS
Another highly complex SEO field – but to break it down to its basics, search engines use links to understand how articles connect to each other. Sensible linking tells search engines that a particular piece of content is worth looking at, because it forms part of a matrix of meaning. And both internal and external links are important. In any given story, it’s a good idea to link to your own related content (do a link to the previous story about the high school protest) and to outside content – do a link to the website of the political party which is organising the protest.
Again, these are good practices anyway: doing links to relevant related content is helpful to readers, and then the SEO follows naturally.
And that really is the big takeaway here: the steps outlined above are important because they are helpful to people. And because they are useful to human beings, it follows that they are helpful to a search engine. There are no dark marketing arts here: there are simply quick ways to make your content accessible to the people who matter the most: your readers.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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