In this week’s class we will briefly discuss how to write stories on the web that are search engine friendly. The following article will perhaps tell you more about SEO; it’s an interview piece with WSJ’s chief SEO strategist. I believe the technical SEO will be a thing of the past soon (or at least it will be irrelevant for news websites, anyway); and this interview also backs up that belief.

SEO at Wall Street Journal: Interview with Alex Bennert

I think one important thing to note again is that social networking and search/user-friendly language are the key for news websites. Beating algorithms should not be a concern as we are living in the age of Facebook/Twitter and increasingly more personalized (and regionalized) search results.

In other words, if your story (an URL) is something people are vigorously “like”-ing and tweeting, your page should rank high in search results; and that’s the reason why we talk about how to write for the web, which makes your story more readable on computer screen and easily sharable (we will talk more on this in the next lecture).

Lastly, this article on OJR by Robert Niles, who use to advocate teaching SEO writing (instead of writing in AP style) in journalism schools, nicely sums up what you need to know.

Search Engine Optimization is dead – Long live Plain English Optimization