I was just asked an interesting question in an email today – how is SEO for a news site different from SEO for other sites whose aim is marketing or PR?

Here was my answer:

The most important aspect of SEO is that content is readable by people (which the search engines try very hard to emulate in their algorithms) and that a site offers up fresh and pertinent content – those are both things that every good news story and every good news site should also do.

Journalists write headlines and leads with keywords that relate to the story and that will draw the audience into reading the rest of the story. They use an inverted pyramid to put important information first. Good SEO does the same thing. Optimizing content for search involves writing content that contains good clues (keywords) so that the readers and search engines rank the content as being relevant.

Good optimization starts with having good content that is relevant to your audience and then knowing your content and your audience well enough to find and use keywords that won’t destroy the content itself. Just packing a bunch of keywords into bad writing won’t work and search engines are getting more and more sophisticated as they try to stamp out content that tries the “keyword stuffing” trick.

While journalistic writing and marketing writing have a different goal – one to inform and the other to sell – the way to optimize each is really very similar. The goal of SEO in either case is the same, improve upon already great content that is wanted/needed by people and make it so that those people can find it.

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