I usually ask back: Well, doesn’t your marketing department promote your newspaper in ads, TV commercials and on billboards? Are you sure that’s well spent money in the digital age? And why shouldn’t you spend your advertising money where the eyeballs of your readers are – the world wide web?

Conversations like these remind me of what Marshall Simmonds, Vice President of Search Engine Marketing at the New York Times, told the audience at the “Search Engine Conference” in San Jose in 2006. A great article on Search Engine Watch summarized his experience to teach the (old-fashioned) journalists at the Times SEO as follows:

The newsroom, however, is an uphill battle. A prime example is the evolution of headlines, which itself earned a dedicated New York Times article ‘This Boring Headline is Written for Google.’ For Simmonds, this means explaining consumer speak and search patterns on a daily basis. “It isn’t ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven’, but a ‘Treo 700,” he said. The newsroom doesn’t always take such advice kindly. “They will be damned if you will teach them how to write. They see the writing on the wall and they see where it is going,” he concluded.<

The New York Times is not only the best newspaper in the world, but it also understood the importance of Search Engine Optimization way before their competitors. Thanks to Simmonds.

According to Search Engine Watch, “the audience quickly learned that Simmonds is not only a search expert, but something of a change management guru. His ability to overcome ego and cut through old school turf wars has become one of the greatest case studies in search engine marketing.”

The changes have been indeed significant: In order to be indexed by the search engines with its entire content, the NYT opened the archives, got rid of a online subscription model and also made the op-eds of their ’star’ commentators Friedman, Dowd, Rich etc. accessible to everybody, improved the internal linking structure and added bottoms for social bookmarking (Digg, Facebook, Mixx, Yahoo Buzz), among others.

The result is evident: The New York Times (as well as About) has experienced an impressing increase in visitors from search – a stunning 108% growth in the last 12 months alone (see chart above).

With its early adoption and these improvement – does it mean NYT is the SEO king among the newspaper in the U.S.?

Answer: It depends. A quick keyword research I did shows that the paper is number one in the Google SERPs for search terms like “breakings news New York”, “find newspaper article online” and article newspaper technology”, but only ranks in the Top 10 for (crucial, I think) keywords like his home turfin

If I would would just search for “news” (search volume: 637319, according to Keyword Discovery) – which of the major news companies outperform their competitors.

Here is the Top 10 list:

1. CNN
2. MSNBC
3. Google News
4. Fox News
5. ABC News
6. Yahoo News
7. Cnet News
8. CBS News
9. NEW YORK TIMES
10. USA Today

P.S. As the description of this blog indicates, I am very passionate about topics at the intersection of Journalism and Search Engine Optimization. I believe that it is crucial for “Old Media” to incorporate SEO into their online strategy in order to survive and be successful (again) in the digital age. To be continued…

Like many others who love L.A. I get shocked when December approaches and I become aware that this city doesn’t have a official Christmas tree. But one can still hope…

Google’s universal search (meaning the inclusion of any keyword-related results, such as pictures, books, news stories etc.) for “New York Christmas” not only lists nice pictures of Christmas trees in the “Big Apple”, but also news stories about Billy Joel’s anti-war Christmas single.

And some New York residents actually OBJECTING a public Christmas tree!

What about the “Los Angeles Christmas”? Oh my, the search results paint a sad, sad picture. No L.A. related Christmas photos, no YouTube videos, no relevant books. Nothing. Zilch.

The only Lala Land relevant Christmas ‘universal’ search result is a news article about “24″ TV star Kiefer Sutherland who will spend Xmas in prison for his second arrest for drunk-driving!

Depressing – but so L.A.!!

As a measure of a page’s popularity, Google assigns it a page rank (PR). Inbound links (IBLs) from pages with high PRs will raise a page’s own rank (the page has, in effect, been graced by the magic touch of a prom king or queen, bestowing a fraction of their popularity upon it). Not surprisingly, this system has been subject to a fair bit of abuse, with avaricious quarterbacks and cheerleaders selling their blessings to viagra and smut peddlers and the like.

And that’s how the celebs would have fared in this system:PR0: Emily DickinsonPR2: ShakespearePR4: Carolus LinneausPR6: Leonardo da VinciPR8: Niccolo MachievelliPR10: The Buddha I especially like the explanations for the PR 10 for The Buddha:

The Buddha’s IBLs would be of the prized kind that Google calls “natural.” And he would have a lot of them, because many of his messages would resonate with the on-line community, such as:- The essence of SEO is suffering- All traffic is transitory- There is a rank beyond page rank- No ban is permanent — all pages get reborn.

According to the data, just 4 percent of all unique search queries made up more than half of all site searches. For e-commerce sites, the number of unique queries fell to just 2 percent. (…) “Marketers should be thinking about site search with the ‘80/20 rule’ in mind, and pay attention to the areas where they’ll get the most bang for their buck,” Steve Kusmer, senior VP and general manager of WebSideStory’s search and content solutions division, told ClickZ. “They should address site search tuning by looking at the top keywords first.” (…)The site search box itself is a tremendous gift to you from your customers: they are telling you exactly what they want, in their own words,” writes Aldrich, who provides a five-step plan for site search improvement in her report.The importance of guiding site search users is magnified because those searchers are 2.7 times as likely to convert than the average site visitor, according to Kusmer. That is in part due to the nature of site search users, who are in effect pre-qualifying themselves as users interested in finding something very specific on a site. A well directed user experience created by good site search results also leads to increased conversions, he added.(Via ClickZ)