Search engine optimization

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Interesting article in today's PaidContent.org blog (Rafat 
Ali/Jimmy Guterman), which I am pasting in below.  Note the 
reference about journalists learning how to write to get higher 
ranking in Google's search results.  This "talk to the machine" 
strategy is critical for anyone writing on the Web today. 
Implications:  (a) legacy content will fall behind in search 
results, making retrospective digitization projects less and less 
valuable over time (b) authors who don't know how to do this will 
be at a disadvantage, pushing them to work with publishers who do 
(Hint:  hire a consultant), and (c) Google creates new problems 
even as it solves others (but no librarian needs to be told 
this).

The reference to the 415 and 408 area codes is amusing, but will 
irk the 650s at Stanford and Sand Hill Road.

Joe Esposito
(831)

" . . .in the U.S. we have the tendency to believe that 
innovation happens only here (and-face it-some of us think it 
happens only in the 415 and 408 area codes), so it's a little 
eye-opening when we look outside the U.S. and see ideas we 
haven't thought of. As the Wall Street Journal reports, British 
newspapers are going past the search-engine optimization most 
U.S. newspapers rely on and battling to buy search terms of news 
events on Google. (U.S. newspapers do some of this, but nowhere 
near as aggressively.) The Daily Telegraph and the Times of 
London, according to the WSJ, are "paying to put their stories in 
front of readers by buying Google ads-a practice the papers say 
has intensified in recent months-[which] is different from past 
marketing efforts. Some readers may not realize that links to 
articles that appear higher up on Google are paid for while 
others appear lower down because they didn't pay, even though the 
higher ones are marked "sponsored links.'"

The story also shows how search-engine optimization has moved 
from marketing to editorial. The Times of London "is training 
journalists to write in a way that makes their articles more 
likely to appear among Google's unpaid search results." This 
won't stop anytime soon, especially as the British papers battle 
for more U.S. readers. As Edward Roussel, the Telegraph's digital 
editor, says, "The most important driver of all readers [to our 
site] is Google, except for people who know us and come directly. 
It plays a critical part of exporting our brand, particularly to 
the U.S." '

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