Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is quickly changing some aspects of what we used to think of as good journalism practice.
Competition for Google rankings is incredibly stiff, as commercial websites strive to reach their page view targets.
Flow Communications has several high-profile clients, for whom we do our very best to attract a stipulated number of visitors to their websites every month. One of the most effective ways to attract visitors to these websites, is through search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
We take into account popular search terms relating to a particular subject, and include those words in our content and our meta data (“invisible” information on websites).
While blogging about the cricket match between South Africa and England at Newlands in Cape Town, we had a discusion about one way SEO is affecting modern journalism.
We pride ourselves on accuracy in all our writing, especially spelling and punctuation, with the correct spelling of names being obligatory.
We debated the name of a South African bowler, wondering whether it was Morne or Morné Morkel. We entered both spellings of the name into Google and in both instances, the top results all linked to sites that spelled his name Morne. We then thought about how people searching for this particular player would generally spell his name and concluded that because of the process involved in inserting an “é” into Google, very few people would do this.
We then decided that regardless of how the man himself spells his name, we would be losing out on Google rankings by spelling his name ‘Morné’.
This is just one example of how SEO is changing the nature of journalism in the digital era.