When Readers Search, Does Your Newspaper Site Show Up?

Almost nothing is more a symbol of Philadelphia than a good, gooey cheesesteak. And Philly.com, the Web site of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, is the city's No. 1 local online information source. So it stands to reason that if you do a Google search on "cheesesteak," or even "Philly cheesesteak," results from Philly.com will pop right up.

Um, nope.

You'll go several pages into a Google search on either one of those terms before you find anything from Philly.com–although dozens of other sources, including out-of-town newspapers, show up in the results. Don't like "cheesesteak" as a Philly icon? Try "Liberty Bell." Same deal: Philly.com is nowhere to be found in the first few pages of results about the city's No. 1 tourist attraction. And it's not that Philly.com doesn't have the content–the site has a good Visitors Guide, and it even ran a poll the other day asking readers to vote on the best Philly cheesesteak. Philly.com's internal search unearths dozens of "cheesesteak" hits. But Google isn't seeing it. And that's not good.

I don't mean to pick on my friends at Philly.com. The problem is not unique to them. Try "inauguration" as a search term. You'll have to go three pages into the results before washingtonpost.com shows up, even though the upcoming inauguration (and the resulting tourist crush) is the biggest story in Washington right now and washingtonpost.com is doing an admirable job of trying to provide coverage and information about it. But again, Google–and the thousands of people searching for information on attending the inauguration–are not seeing it.

The problem lies in an arcane but critically important piece of Web art (and science) known as SEO–search engine optimization. Fine-tuning Web sites so that their content is highly visible to Google and other search engines is crucial to success on the Web–and very few, if any, newspaper sites are fully using this important tool.

There are a lot of components to SEO–it includes proper page naming and tagging, search-friendly headlines (watch those local abbreviations and colloquialisms), how a site is structured and how much effort a site puts into getting other sites to link to it (and linking out). There are experts who make a living maximizing search optimization for successful Web sites. It's a growth industry, for sure.

But this is still a little-known skill on newspaper Web teams, even though it's arguably as important as many newsroom traditional skills. As I wrote a while back, newspapers wouldn't think of not doing print promotion or keeping their newsboxes working to collect those precious quarters. But they don't seem to understand that in the Web world, skills like search-engine optimization are just as important to success, and that they need to have those skills on staff.

If you aren't actively optimizing your newspaper site for search–and it's a full-time job, at minimum–you're all but hiding your Web site under a bushel for the many, many Web users who navigate via Google search. When somebody searches Google for a local institution, icon, person or place, your local news site should come up on the first page–if not the top of the results. If that doesn't happen, you're giving away traffic and ad dollars.

Update: More on SEO and newspapers from Andrew Shotland. And a quick overview on the SEO industry from The New York Times.

Comments

[Rocky]

As a former online news guy and a former search product manager, this topic is dear to my heart.

Sadly, a big part of the problem is the craptastic CMSs that news sites use to publish. Awful URLs like:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/14/AR2009011404198.html?hpid=topnews

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/americas/15venez.html?_r=1&hp

are a big part of the problem.

Not only are these useless to Google, if someone sends me a URL, they do nothing to entice me to click.

Paginating news stories also screws up search results and devalues links that you get.

The sad thing (for newspapers) is that most of the blog tools like WordPress and TypePad were built with SEO in mind.

[greeneyeshade]

I think it's a different skill set, too. We've just started writing multimedia heds in my shop, and been warned not to try to use allusions or wordplay ... which of course is half the fun of writing print heds. Well, nobody said it would be easy. ...

[Andrew Shotland]

Hey Mark,

Newspapers, and any company with a strong local brand for that matter, are sitting on a search gold mine and most of them do not know it. It seems like the problem is top management is mired in solving the problems of their "core" business. I suspect many do not realize that for a relatively low/no investment they could be dominating high CPM local search queries. They just need a guy/gal who understands SEO and a CMS that allows them to easily create and link to content. If a 21-yr-old in his bedroom can generate thousands of dollars a month off of adsense and affiliate deals with no brand, think of what a strong newspaper domain could do.

I think William Randolph Hearst said it best “In suggesting gifts: Money is appropriate, and one size fits all.”

[seo expert]

I just finished optimizing a newspaper site and got loads and loads of facts from it. When you optimize a site that has loads of data, you have to be precise in handling that campaign because with just a minor slip up can lead to disastrous results.

[Anne M.]

On these days it's really important to match your Web site, especially that it has just so dynamic and dependent on an audience, according to the main forms of the latest SEO rules.

But it is important to pay attention - it's really appropriate that when a person is looking for some information about a certain thing, Will it (article, for example) be relevant to what he should really search for?

Sometimes exposure is nice, but it is not always efficient.

news