Say goodbye to SEO.

The now-conventional strategy of harnessing links and keywords to climb higher in search results has been fading for a while. Social media emerged as an alternative referral source. Google tweaked its quality signals to reduce the … Read more

TheAtlantic.com
"Rather than settle for a humorless future, some online editors are fighting back by refusing to embrace SEO guidelines for every story," writes David Wheeler. He says that because young journalists are beginning their careers at the dawn of the SEO craze, some fans of funny headlines wonder if the battle has already been lost.

"Sharp, witty headlines that stray off the 'literalness' line will live, barely, for a little while longer," says Lexington Herald-Leader copy editor Will Scott. "However, as the veterans of newspapers are gradually replaced by younger copy editors who grew up with the Web, we will see such headlines less and less."

From "Why Journalists Need to Stop Resenting SEO"

Learn how to write an SEO-friendly headline: One of the biggest complaints from journalists seems to be that SEO is killing their headlines. Instead of being poetic in titles, journalists now have to use “SEO-powered words”. While I love a good pun as much as anyone, the “SEO-powered words” get your content found. Not using them loses you traffic.

When U.S. Airways Flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson River, The New York Times was the first outlet to break the story. For some reason, they didn’t use the term “plane crash” in the title and created something clever instead. The result was that no one saw their story. All of their readers and their potential readers were searching for “plane crash”. They missed out the thousands (millions?) of people who were frantically searching for information about what had happened. You can’t do that. And yet it happens with papers every day.

> Gene Weingarten: My biggest beef with the New Newsroom is what has happened to headlines

When Google introduced its new algorithm earlier this year aimed at elevating the quality of its search results, some of the hardest-hit sites were content farms like eHow, run by Demand Media.

An NPR story Tuesday shows that the … Read more

Sparksheet.com
"If there’s a story that we want to do just because we want to, we go ahead and do it," says Slate editor David Plotz. "But when we’ve done it, we look to figure out what people are searching around this topic, what they are going to be searching for, and how we can ensure our menu lines and the various things that search engines pay attention to reflect how readers are actually searching. Sometimes we see that people are looking for such and such topic on the Web, and if someone has a great angle on it, we decide how to do the story."

Columbia Journalism Review
Blame SEO for that. "Puns and double entendre and the significance of the far left-hand column on the first page have been consigned to the dustbin of journalistic history, as out of date as even the 1974 remake of 'The Front Page,'" writes Karen Stabiner.

MediaPost
The Scripps-owned HGTV recently partnered with Examiner.com to “seed” editorial coverage of the network’s television programs, according to Laurie Sullivan.

Sullivan reports that HGTV purchased online advertising in return for which local “Examiners” were encouraged to write about HGTV … Read more