Posted on Feb 19, 2012 in Digital Marketing, More Visitors: SEO & SEM | 0 comments

In two previous posts I wrote about why you need to optimize for search engines and what that means. In this post I give a series of checklists for what editorial, marketing, and technology needs to do to boost readership using SEO. SEO Part 3: How To Do SEO Right SEO is often delegated to the technology team, with the instructions “just optimize the site for SEO.”  There are certainly technology best practices in SEO, but they tend to be easily implemented by any reasonably good dev team. The bulk of SEO work is actually in marketing, content production, reporting, and analysis. You can’t just hand SEO over to developers expecting them to drive more search traffic to the site, or to magically raise the page rank. A lot of the responsibility belongs to marketing and editorial. Since this is a blog and not a book, I’ve broken out the “How to SEO” into three sets of simple checklists, for editorial, marketing, and technology: Editorial SEO Search engines use programs called “crawlers” or “robots” to analyze your site. These crawlers are not very smart; they don’t look for Pulitzer prize-winning stories. They only check for new pages, see what pages have been updated, and most important, they look for keywords and rank content by keyword relevance. Your stories have to be tagged; tags are your search keywords, and are important both for readers, who search using keywords, and for robots, who index you in a  search engine using those same tags. Make sure that tags reflect actual page content. Remember all proper nouns (People, Places, Things, Events), synonyms, and even common permutations. Some clever taggers even include common misspellings (not necessarily a good idea when tags are prominently displayed in a list next to your story, like HuffPo does). Remember that keywords are the words a person might type into a search engine; don’t choose phrases no one would ever actually type, and don’t pick phrases that are popular but would cause them to be dismayed that they linked to you. So if the story isn’t really about Lady Gaga, don’t add her as a tag, even if it might...

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