I’m not arguing that journalists shouldn’t write clear, informative headlines…that’s a straw man Josh set up. I’m arguing that journalists shouldn’t be in the business of selling newspapers or placing advertising, and that’s what the article I responded to suggests. Can you sell tickets to someone in Indiana? Theoretically. Will you? No. Not enough to warrant the effort.

If a story is about Fayetteville, should Fayetteville be mentioned in the story? Of course it should. Not because a search engine won’t pick it up, but because it’s good journalism. Do it because it’s good journalism. If it’s good for a search engine, so be it. But I think the intent is important. There are a million things you can do to trick a search engine to get crappy content to the top of the results. As journalists, let’s concentrate on the million things we can do to serve our communities the best we can.

For the second part of your comment…I’m specifically talking about newspaper websites here. The vast majority of American journalists are working for local news organizations. I do think different rules apply to national and international organizations, but I believe those cases, advertising is way more important than SEO. I can tell you precisely how many times I’ve searched for something and returned to a site time and time again: zero. If your site isn’t a destination for me, reading one decent story there isn’t going to change that.

As far as driving traffic goes, if someone from Indiana is searching for Syracuse basketball, you can advertise Syracuse tickets to them. Heck, you can advertise Indiana tickets to them. (But they won’t find it if the headline says SU instead of Syracuse.) But Dan is right, the prime business is loyal local customers for local businesses.

I’ve just never seen SEO as all that different from what we want staffers to do anyway. Write an informative, to-the-point headline that gets people to read your story. SEO is just a different set of style points, and considering how arcane some newspaper style points are, it might actually be an improvement.

You’re also right that I’m an idealist. As I wrote here, I left the industry precisely because the industry — and the people in it — don’t recognize the privilege they have. And as such, they produce sub-standard content — content that does not meet the needs of the community. That’s why there’s a death spiral. That’s why people started turning to the Internet in the first place.

Your argument, by extension, means journalists should do whatever they can to ensure they can pay the bills. So why not buy your stories? Why not make them up entirely? If it sells paper or drives traffic, it works in Josh’s vision of “journalism,” right? Well, not mine.

BTW, the lack of traffic isn’t keeping newspapers from making money from online advertising. Just the idea that more traffic needs to be sent to newspaper websites is specious at best. The reason newspapers can’t make money online is that they undervalued online ads from the beginning. To prop up the print ads, they sold against online ads…they made sure advertisers knew the value was in print and not online. Kinda hard to change your advertisers’ minds after you convinced them the first time.

Journalists are getting laid off and newspapers are closing. This isn’t happening (for the most part) because they’re not producing good journalism, it’s happening because they’re still trying to reach a market that no longer exists. The newspaper model hasn’t changed in many years. Newspapers have simply cut size and changed their layout to try to maintain their bottom lines, and it’s not working.

Newspapers can seek primarily loyal readers, but whatever they’re doing isn’t working. You can’t keep the lights on and the presses running by appealing to a small group of loyal readers; you need to have a larger group of people buying, even if a large portion of that group is ephemeral.

One of the reasons it didn’t matter to me that I was leaving the industry — and I probably would have gone after the right offer anywhere — is that I’d come in with that change-the-world ideal that many young journalists have, and I gave up on newspapers being able to provide that and still be able to pay the bills.

Brian C asked me in a Q&A if I read the paper, and I answered as delicately as I could that no, I don’t, because it doesn’t give me enough. What I didn’t say is I can’t justify 75 cents and more paper to recycle for a 10-minute read. I would be one of those loyal readers if the market would support a product full of people being damned good at journalism. But at the moment, it doesn’t.

No, I don’t have “proof” that the AP adopted website for SEO. Their press release on the new edition said it was due to “customer demand.” I think it’s reasonable to guess that SEO was one of a bunch of factors driving that customer demand. I’m guessing in the next three to five years, we’re going to see the AP move to postal abbreviations for states, as well.

Ignoring the “rules” of the web, including SEO, is the offline equivalent of just dropping newspaper boxes everywhere and stocking them equally. But we don’t do that. We put them in high-traffic areas where people are likely to buy them: outside of diners and convenience stores instead of in the middle of public parks and on the tops of trees in people’s yards. The difference is, the rules of the web, for better or worse, include content in a way that offline marketing doesn’t.

The problem many news organizations run into is that when they hire SEOs is that they hire SEOs with no usability experience and no news background, and then they listen to those SEOs blindly. Seriously, it makes me want to punch babies. And publishers.

The larger overall argument here — and this is just a facet of it — is, is it more important to produce good journalism, or for newspapers to be able to pay the bills? Because in the current climate, the first is not leading to the second.

Secondly, what argument can you possibly put forth that one-time visits are good for anyone? They aren’t good for advertisers and they are good for newspaper sites in the long term. They’re bad for advertisers because (especially if they’re out-of-towners) they artificially inflate numbers with visitors who won’t buy local products anyway. And they’ll hurt newspapers because they artificially inflate the expectations of advertisers. When they don’t get results, they won’t buy ads from you. That’s just plain logic. Not only that, but I’ve seen it in practice.

The SEO crowd loves numbers. I don’t. I’ve seen newspapers and websites fall all over themselves to get numbers for years now, and it hasn’t helped. It’s not numbers that count; it’s loyalty. You don’t get loyal readers by making marketers of your journalists. You don’t get loyal readers by pandering to an algorithm. You get loyal readers by being damned good at what you do.

Do you have any proof the AP adopted “website” for SEO purposes? Cuz I bet that’s not it. AP recognizes the changing language. And I don’t think Web site was ever the popular spelling.

I guess I’m just not clear on why journalists can only either learn AP Style or SEO writing. Seriously, people’s brains are big enough for both, and really, good SEO writing is a couple of basic rules, until you get to the black hat trickery that you seem to think is all SEOs do.

I think good SEO comes naturally to smart people without them even considering it. If you were writing this piece for a print paper, you may have used a headline like “Journos, forget SEO” to make it a two-column, single-deck hed. But you have space, and you spelled out journalists and search engines. Ta-da! SEO writing. When newspapers started on the web, they weren’t doing that — they were simply shoveling the print headline and print story to the site. Now they’re recognizing the need for stuff like web-friendly headlines and findable copy.

And AP is recognizing that, too — they recently made a change from Web site to website; the second is searched so much more frequently than the first.

The fact that fewer people are reading newspapers and the 1940s and days of 52% profit lines are gone, means there has to be some evolution in the industry. I’m certain you and I are in agreement that what’s important here is that journalists deliver strong news content in a manner that is readable and effective. I just find there is a need for pulling in one-time reader traffic to keep page views — and, it follows, ad revenue — up for the online side, and that’s where using some basic SEO, like good headlines and ledes, comes in.

Secondly, there’s no argument you can offer that drive-by traffic has any worth at all — especially on a local news website. Someone in Indiana who’s brought to a news site in Syracuse to read about the plane landing on the Hudson is not helping you at all. In fact, it’s probably hurting you, because it artificially inflates the number of potential customers your advertisers believe they’re reaching on your site.

I think you’re absolutely right about the iPad and such. Branded apps will be transformative, and will make SEO even less important.

Yeah…I’ve only had this domain for a year. Outside of the normal WordPress stuff that’s built in, I don’t do any SEO. But regardless what Google suggests, the results on the front page are all me.