The Fundamentals of SEO for Print Journalists

This is a podcast episode about the fundamentals of SEO for print journalists. The purpose is to help print journalists understand SEO and get more readers for their work. The episode covers three main topics: defining SEO, the importance of choosing the right keywords, and why SEO is essential for online journalism. The episode explains that SEO is about optimizing websites to rank well on search engines. Choosing the right keywords is crucial for SEO, and long-tail keywords are recommended. The episode also provides guidance on where to use keywords in an article. SEO is important because it helps people find your work among millions of articles online. Hello, I'm Miriam Burke, writer, editor and host of the Fundamentals of SEO for Print Journalists. Welcome to the very first episode and thanks for joining. The purpose of this podcast is to help you, the print journalist who has found themselves in the digital world, figure out the basics of search engine optimization, better known as SEO. Any writer using a digital platform to promote their work should have a basic understanding of SEO so that they can do what all writers want to do, get as many readers as possible to read their work. There are three parts to this introductory lesson. By the end of it you should be able to, one, define SEO, two, state the importance of choosing the right keywords, and three, describe in your own words why SEO is an essential element of online journalism. In subsequent lessons I will go into further details on applying SEO and I will instruct you on how to apply the principles of SEO to your work to effectively market it to the specific audience. Part 1. So let's kick things off with a short explanation on what SEO actually is. Wix, a software company that allows users to launch their own websites, puts it nicely. In a blog post the writer describes search engine optimization as the process of optimizing websites so that they rank well on search engines through organic, non-paid searches. When SEO experts say optimizing, we mean giving the piece of content you have written the best chance of being found on a search engine, like Google, when somebody enters a search term. For instance, someone is interested in how Brexit will affect customs charges in Ireland. When searching for the answer online they will likely type in something like this, how will Brexit affect customs charges in Ireland? If you have created an article on this subject that has been optimized for SEO, that person searching for it will have a much better chance of finding your piece of work. If you publish an article that was not optimized for SEO, it won't appear anywhere near the top-ranked articles relating to the question posed by the person searching online, because the so-called search engine bot won't be able to find it. Now is a good time to press pause and take a few moments to reflect on the definition of SEO. You should be able to describe the meaning of SEO in your own words. Part 2. This brings us to the subject of keywords. Choosing the appropriate keyword for the article you want to optimize is the cornerstone of SEO. Now it is important to remember that when we use the term keyword, we can mean one word or a phrase. One-word keywords in the SEO world are known as head keywords and multi-word keywords are known as long-tail keywords. The online marketing tool SEMrush has an excellent guide to keywords on its blog where it describes how long-tail keywords stand a much better chance of ranking higher in search engine results than one-word keywords. Let's stay with the example I used before and say you have written an article on how Brexit will affect customs charges in Ireland. The word Brexit on its own is a keyword but so is the multi-word phrase how will Brexit affect customs charges in Ireland or just Brexit affect customs charges in Ireland. If you google the keyword Brexit over 300 million results are found covering every single topic related to it. So type in the much more specific phrase how will Brexit affect customs charges in Ireland and much fewer results and much more detailed results are found. So let's press pause for a moment and think about where to apply the keyword within your article. The very first place where it needs to be is the headline however the keyword should be inserted strategically throughout the article and in some key places. These are the introduction, in further headings, in the meta description which is the snippet that appears under a search result in a search engine that summarizes the page's content. Going back to our Brexit article let's say that we've decided that the keyword is Brexit affect customs charges in Ireland. The first place the keyword needs to be is the headline. In this case we can create that classic digital headline the question from the keyword. The headline is then how will Brexit affect customs charges in Ireland. So it's a good searchable headline that contains your keyword. The next thing you would do is write an introduction that also contains the keyword. You might write something like this. Will Brexit affect customs charges in Ireland? We report on the remarks made by consumer journalist Siobhan McGuire about why we should be worried. This is a good introduction because it outlines what the article is about and it also contains the keyword. Then through the rest of the article you would slot in the keyword in sentences where it makes sense to and in sub headlines. Inserting the keyword at the end of the article in the conclusion helps to wrap up the article and it's a good rule to go by as it helps to fill up the number of times the keyword appears in the piece. A content management system, CMS, is software used for the creation of content. A common one is WordPress. In most CMSs the author of the article can write the meta description themselves and this is definitely a place to include the keyword. Include it in image names too if you are including images. Most online articles will feature at least one image and if they don't they really should because it's a good opportunity for SEO. Part 3. Keywords are probably the most important part of SEO and this first episode of the podcast should give you the basics on how to use them in your work. However I know that as a writer coming into the digital sphere from a print background the use of keywords can seem quite stifling and at the start it can be. Practice however will put it into perspective. The more you start to write this way the easier it becomes and the subsequent positive traffic results, that is the number of people who read your optimized articles, is only a good thing. SEO is essential in online journalism for this one reason. It gives the people who you want to read your work the best chance of finding it. By the end of this podcast series you should be able to confidently apply SEO to your work without ever compromising on the quality of your journalism. As we come to the end of lesson 1 I'll outline a quick recap. Today we discussed the very core of SEO where I gave you a definition from Wix who say it's the process of optimizing websites so that they rank well on search engines through organic non-paid searches. We explored the concept of keywords and I described the difference between head and long tail keywords and explained why long tail is a better option. We also went through how and where to use keywords in your online content piece. Finally we discussed the main reason why SEO is essential in online journalism because it enables more people to find your piece of work among millions of articles online. That's it for now but please join me for the next lesson where I will be answering the top 5 questions about SEO asked by print journalists. I'm Miriam Burke. This has been episode 1 of the fundamentals of SEO for print journalists. Thanks for listening. Bye!