SEO

Finding what you need
without the search

Web sites know it’s difficult to get you to visit them just to browse, so they need search engines to lure you in with links.

The more attractive a web site is to search engines, the more visitors the site will get. Large numbers of visitors make a web site attractive to advertisers, so the owners of the site will make more money.

Becoming attractive to search requires that web sites have content that matches what people want to find. Search engines know what people want by tracking what people ask for. Google, and many other search engines, share that information with the public.

The result is SEO – search engine optimization. Very simply it means writing stories in such a way that they are attractive to search engines and that has very little to do with the quality of the journalism.

Howard Kurtz, former media writer at the Washington Post, explained it this way:

I can no longer file a story in our computer system without filling out a box, a small gray square that may well determine the future of serious journalism.

The box is supposed to contain words and phrases that will help me reel you in. Search has become a journalistic obsession on the Web, and with good reason. Most people don't read publications online, patiently turning from national news to Metro to Style to the sports section. They hunt for subjects, and people, in which they're interested.

Our mission – and we have no choice but to accept it – is to grab some of that traffic that could otherwise end up at hundreds of other places, even blogs riffing off the reporting that your own publication has done. If you appease the Google gods with the right keywords, you are blessed with more readers. So carried to a hypothetical extreme, an ideal headline would be, "Sarah Palin rips non-Muslim Obama over mosque while Lady Gaga remains silent."

This phenomenon is pushing reporters and editors to make story decisions based on what we’ll read, not necessarily what’s news or what’s important. In some newsrooms, reporters are paid based on the number of readers their stories attract.

If the news is based on what we ask for, we’re likely to miss a lot of the news we need. What’s worse, we may find important stories “dumbed down” so they have a chance to be included in the results of a search.

SEO may be a great way to help us find news we want, but it can also cause us to avoid the news we need.

To take advantage of what editors and producers can do for us, we must approach the news with open minds and not an agenda based on a saved search. Browsing news web sites, newspapers and broadcasts can help us discover things we might not have realized we wanted to know.

Search engines help us find things; good journalism lets us explore.