SEO inside Newsrooms: Reports from the Field

Abstract

The journalism profession has changed dramatically in the digital age as the internet, and new technologies, in general, have created new working conditions in the media environment. Concurrently, journalists and media professionals need to be aware and possess a new set of skills connected to web technologies, as well as respond to new reading tendencies and information consumption habits. A number of studies have shown that search engines are an important source of the traffic to news websites around the world, identifying the significance of high rankings in search results. Journalists are writing to be read, and that means ensuring that their news content is found, also, by search engines. In this context, this paper represents an exploratory study on the use of search engine optimization (SEO) in news websites. A series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with professionals at four Greek media organizations uncover trends and address issues, such as how SEO policy is operationalized and applied inside newsrooms, which are the most common optimization practices, as well as the impact on journalism and news content. Today, news publishers have embraced the use of SEO practices, something that is clear also from this study. However, the absence of a distinct SEO culture was evident in newsrooms under study. Finally, according to results, SEO strategy seems to depend on factors, such as ownership and market orientation, editorial priorities or organizational structures.

“Outside the industry, nobody knows what we do” SEO as seen by search engine optimizers and content providers

“…Although SEO played a role in the media organisations at that time, there were reservations about SEO possibly imposing restrictions on journalistic work. Similar reservations were expressed by SEO representatives of Greek (Giomelakis et al, 2019) and Indonesian (Prawira and Rizkiansyah, 2018) newsrooms. According to the interviewees of Giomelakis et al (2019), SEO was considered indispensable as it ensures visibility of the content.…”

“…Similar reservations were expressed by SEO representatives of Greek (Giomelakis et al, 2019) and Indonesian (Prawira and Rizkiansyah, 2018) newsrooms. According to the interviewees of Giomelakis et al (2019), SEO was considered indispensable as it ensures visibility of the content. However, it was emphasized that SEO has a major influence on topic setting and that this can reduce the quality of the journalism being produced.…”

Transferencia de autoridad en cibermedios mediante hiperenlaces: el efecto de la endogamia en internet de los grupos mediáticos españoles

“…Es por esta razón por la que los cibermedios están teniendo cada vez una mayor dependencia del posicionamiento en buscadores (en adelante SEO) (Giomelakis, et al, 2019;Lopezosa et al, 2018b;2019). En este sentido, se ha de recordar que se entiende por SEO al conjunto de estrategias que potencian la oportunidad por la que un contenido web es susceptible de aparecer en los resultados más altos de los rankings de Google, Bing, etc.…”

“…Este tema ya ha sido estudiado desde diferentes perspectivas, principalmente desde el enlazado masivo desde directorios web (Jachimczyk et al, 2016) y granjas de enlaces (Gonzalo-Penela, 2006), desde el intercambio recíproco de enlaces en cooperación con otros sitios web (Giomelakis, et al, 2019) redes de hipervínculos (Fu y Shumate, 2016;Weber, 2012;Sjøvaag et al, 2019), hipertextualidad centrada en hipervínculos (Chang et al, 2011;De Maeyer, 2012; De Maeyer y Holton, 2016), el uso de hipervínculos externos en los medios de comunicación (Gao y Vaughan, 2005;Himelboim, 2010) y desde la compraventa de enlaces en medios de comunicación online (Lopezosa et al, 2018), sin embargo no se ha estudiado el envío de enlaces entre páginas web de un mismo grupo mediático o empresarial.…”

Search Engine Optimization

“…The purpose of this paper is to study the extent to which a university's academic excellence is related to the quality of its web presence. The study deals with the website quality and search engine optimization (SEO) performance of the most well-known university websites, using the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) Shanghai list as a base of reference.Finally, the fifth paper was written by Dimitrios Giomelakis, Christina Karypidou, and Andreas Veglis [5] includes an exploratory study on the use of search engine optimization (SEO) in news websites. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with SEO and media professionals at four Greek media organizations, the study examines the familiarity of these news publishers with SEO practices, including common trends and practices inside their own newsrooms, and the perceived impact of SEO on journalism and news content.…”