It appears that a growing number of media organizations are using search engine optimization (SEO) to help increase traffic to their sites, and some are even admitting to readers that they’re using the technique to improve search engine rankings.
In a piece published today on Richmond.com – a website aimed at residents of Richmond, Virginia which is owned by a company that publishes a number of newspapers in the state – Karri Peifer writes that the site has changed the name of the column in order to improve its search engine optimization (SEO).
Peifer says that the site will be changing the title of the column each week, writing that "Search engines, like google or yahoo, don’t like when people, like me, insist on calling something the same thing week after week."
While Richmond.com believes this will improve SEO, it appears to be angering some longtime readers who are having trouble finding the column.
But one commenter to the column notes that changing the name of the column is not necessary and suggests adding what the column is about in front of the title and also including some of the keywords in the page’s URL to improve search engine optimization (SEO).
As the amount of information on the web increases, news organizations are increasingly turning to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to increase their search engine ranking. In what appeared to be an oversight from its online department last month, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story which included a list of keywords that were used for SEO purposes in the story.
