In response to Roy’s blog post last week about how SEO is changing journalism, I’d like to offer another perspective.
Although journalists are now trying to bend their grammar and style to maximise the SEO potential of their posts, they shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the actual content matters.
Although short-term gains can be won by writing a clever, SEO-friendly title and first paragraph, the real gains come when people actually link to the content. And people only link to the content if they find it valuable and think that other people will find it valuable.
So the actual substance of the article still means more than any keyword optimisation you could do. Yes, you could rank at the top of Google for a few days with “Top ten tips for losing weight”, but if your tips don’t hold the audience captive, provide insight and credibility, your article won’t be linked to and someone else will soon enough take your perch atop the Google pile.
The reason Google is so successful is that it does rank good content near the top – when you conduct a search you usually find what you’re looking for on the first page of Google results. And Google has some of the best mathematicians and engineers in the world working day and night to ensure that the best content stays at the top.
Yes, the nefarious art of black hat SEO, where you try to con Google with cleverly placed keywords and links, can win in the short term, but it will never win in the long term. If you’re paying for someone to write copy for the sake of giving the search engines something to crawl, rather than to add value to your website and your users, you’re (quite frankly) wasting your money. Firstly, your rank won’t last forever. Secondly, the people who do click on this content will not convert into clients or supporters because the copy will be speaking to a search engine rather than to a human.
So the traditional values of journalism still apply: timeliness, depth, perspective, accuracy, credibility, honesty. By all means, structure your content to ensure you catch Google’s eye, but ensure that you back it up with content that will endear your site to your readers and make them want to link to you, share your content on social networks and interact with it.
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Interesting topic. But at the end of the day, the principles of journalism continue to affect SEO more than SEO affects journalism.
For an html-driven programmer who operates in an environment where SEO is considered one of the first commandments of website development, you make a convincing argument for the greater importance of good journalism.