Breaking News: Journalism Offers Real Threat to Traditional SEO
How is SEO being utilised in online reporting to compete with the conventional uses?
The theory of SEO has been around long enough now for even people not in the industry to have a basic grasp of how and why search engine optimisation is performed. This is probably the main reason it is being adopted in other forms of media – and not all for good.
One way in which SEO tactics are being used outside the traditional sphere is in online journalism. A real war is being waged between media outlets to drive traffic to their sites, which is why they are so widely ‘stealing’ optimising theories. Here, the journalist will deliberately use Meta tags and descriptions, alongside keyword rich text and even URLs to ensure their news stories are being read and feature prominently in the search rankings.
Journalism is one industry that has been particularly ravaged by the recession. Media sources have had to come up with new and inventive ways to generate traffic to their site, and create a new revenue stream. Advertisers will be keen to promote their goods and services on a site that occupies page one of Google after all.
While on a basic level this is similar to typical organic SEO, it could also be argued that these are underhand black hat techniques designed purely to elevate a particular website to the top of the SERPS. The use of a current headline-making event or celebrity as a tool for keyword stuffing is one way to cheat the system for instance.
How can this be a bad thing I hear you cry? Because there are increasing incidences where SEO-led news stories are in direct competition with the websites that you may be optimising. For example, one of your company’s has been found to have acted negligently which has resulted in damage to property or, even worse, serious injury.
Suddenly, you will find yourself needing to ‘smother’ this story by pushing it down the listings, to ensure that if a reader types that organisation’s name into a search engine the first thing that they see isn’t negative press. This protection of your client’s reputation could become a significant part of the industry as things progress.
While the basic tenets of SEO are the same across the board, as our previous blog post ‘Winning the SEO Battle – Let Quality Content Lead the Way’ stated, quality is still very much king, regardless of the media platform. But the adoption of optimisation strategies by alternative mediums could pose unforeseen problems to existing SEO suppliers, which require tackling head-on.
