It’s not good enough to present the world with a beautiful website or a well-researched article. Without search engine optimization, the world won’t see it.
Media companies need their headlines to be optimized for search engines to pick them up and reach more people.
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
It’s a three-letter acronym that may sound like magic or sorcery to those who don’t really understand it, but SEO – search engine optimization – is a vital part of the internet, even if it’s one you don’t see .
It is the process of affecting a website’s online visibility in search results.
SEO is all about words. But it has to be the right words, in the right order, leading to the right type of website, before Google will show your site at the top of a search.
And exactly how to attract Google’s web-crawling spiders is an ever-changing mystery, with the search giant regularly changing its algorithms and keeping its methods a closely guarded secret.
Skilled operators can use SEO to generate thousands more clicks, and even repair tarnished reputations.
Communications and PR consultant Hazel Phillips talks to The Detail about some of the clients she’s helped, whose social or business mistakes have required serious reorientation to avoid the internet throwing up their past mistakes.
She uses her SEO knowledge to get this past the front page of the internet and help clean up her virtual slates. Or at least drag them down through internet search results until they’re out of sight.
“Ninety percent of people won’t click past the first page of Google,” he says. “The first page is absolutely everything. And about a third of people will click on the first link that comes up.”
If you let a mistake, such as a legal judgment against you, get out on the World Wide Web, it becomes a burden, because everyone is searching on Google. It can destroy businesses and even lives.
Phillips warns that repairing a reputation is not a magic wand and that the damage must be truly repaired and an apology made before YouTube’s carefully crafted videos, blogs and opinion pieces begin to take effect .
The Detail also speaks to Krystal Abey-Leenders, the senior editor of RNZ’s homepage. He takes us on a tour of RNZ’s CMS (content management system – the backend of the website) where all this important but invisible work takes place.
She says SEO is the subtle art of making RNZ stories look good on Google so readers can easily find them. It’s all about keywords.
“You just have to ask yourself, if I were to search for this topic, what would I search for on Google?” she says. “And basically those would be the first keywords you would put in your sentences.”
Google crawls not only the first part of headlines, but also photo captions, and takes into account how new the site’s content is, how reliable the source is, and how much information it contains.
And when it comes to breaking news, see which organization posted it first, as long as, in their rush to lead the way, a digital publisher didn’t forget to throw in those all-important keywords.
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