12.30
In a recent speech at the World Newspaper Congress, the then Associate Editor of the Mirror Matt Kelly again criticised the use of search engine optimisation (SEO) to drive users to news websites.
The gist of Kelly’s argument is that news website should concentrate on building a loyal audience rather than ‘casual’ users who visit only through a search engine.
But in his speech, he did make one very good point:
It [re-establishing the Mirror's online businesses] means building sites that perform well for humans, not search engines.
Build sites for ‘humans’
But the irony is that good SEO is just that – building websites for humans, not search engines.
This is because, for a particular search query, a search engine’s aim is to deliver the most relevant results to human searchers. So they like sites that are built with people in mind.
Most search engines also use inbound links to a page as a ‘vote’ when deciding where to rank a page in their results. Yes, there are ways to manipulate this with link building. But the general idea is that a site or page with good content aimed at people will get more inbound links, meaning more ‘votes’ and better rankings.
Using the right words
Another key part of SEO is doing keyword research. And then using the keywords and key phrases you want to target prominently on your site with the aim of increasing your rankings for these keywords.
But this doesn’t just affect your rankings – using the words that your users (or as Kelly says, ‘readers’) on your web site and web pages makes perfect sense and is good for usability.
For example, if you’re on a page about Premiership news you’d expect it to be mentioned in places like the title tag, headings and main content as well as on links to that page. And if your readers use ‘Premier League news’ rather than ‘Premiership news’ it would make sense to call it that – not only to attract more users from search engines but to relate to ‘loyal’ users (or should we say readers?).
Usability lessons
Actually, it could be argued that the Mirror’s 3am site could use some lessons in usability.
Navigational links like ‘Ooh’, ‘Gasp’ and ‘Grr’ might work well in print but would they encourage even loyal ‘readers’ to click through on the website? Or would links that actually describe the page’s content work better?
For me, descriptive links work best every time – for users and SEO.
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Nice one. It’s emerging quite clearly that the best SEO ‘tactics’ are quality and relevance. These are Google’s (other search engines are available) reason for being. Social networking also ultimately works to promote the ‘best’ – if good old ‘word of mouth’ is working in your favour you’re onto a winner. Provide the best resource you can and you will be suitably rewarded.