Optimizing your Newspaper for the Web.

Some may say that the dramatic decrease in newspaper circulation is not due to the Internet. They may be right in part but not in whole. With dual incomes and very busy work schedules, people are finding it easier to get the top stories of the day during their breaks at work by browsing the Internet.

In order to increase your papers readership, you need to also be able to put the paper in front of customers while they are at work. When it comes to ranking high on the search engines for a particular topic, content is king. Newspapers have the content but lack what is needed to rank high in order to get readers. Everyday editors write up articles on current events as well as historical. If you were to do a Google search on a term such as “Iraqi War”, you would think you would have all the search results on the first 2 pages being from major Newspapers. This is not the case at all.

Just by having content online nowadays is not enough. You must optimize your website page for the subject being talked about. This optimization is referred to as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Doing SEO of your websites will give the search engine crawlers more specific details of what you are writing about. Each search engine company such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, all have some type of search engine algorithm. These algorithms will determine where you would show up on the results page of a search. Unfortunately their algorithms change frequently so sometimes you will rank within the top 10 results on page 1 and the next time you could end up on page 2. This generally is not too alarming because with a well optimized website, you will end up back at the top.

What needs to change on your site to increase Search Engine Ranking?

Well, again, newspapers have plenty of content, good content at that. You need to outline what exactly the content is about and generate some keywords or key phrases from this.

The metatag section within the section of your html page contains some key tags that are important to your optimization. The title, keyword and description metatags are what I am talking about.

Lets say for example you were writing an article about David Beckham moving to California to play soccer for the Los Angles Galaxy. Then an appropriate TITLE metatag for your webpage would be: “Soccer Player David Beckham | Los Angles Galaxy”.

The KEYWORD metatag phrases to use would be something like “David Bechkam, los angles galaxy, British soccer star, bechkam soccer”. And perhaps a DESCRIPTION metatag like this, “British soccer star David Beckham signs on with the Los Angles Galaxy soccer team for $10 million a year.”

Even though this was an example, I hope you get the point. Content, keyword/phrases then your title and description should include 2 of your top keywords.

Once your site is optimized and once the search engines crawl your site. You should have a very good search engine page ranking. However, the search engines must know that your webpage even exists. This leads us to another portion of website optimization.

You optimize your website or webpage because you feel you have something that others want to read. One way to have the search engines know that your page exists is to have your webpage link added to someone else’s webpage that is already established on the Internet. Why do this? Well if a website is already established and is already being crawled by search engine spiders. The spiders will see your link from this site and then spawn off to crawl your site. This is a very critical piece to SEO because 1), you will now be index faster by the search engines and 2), if the site that had your link on it has a high page ranking with the search engines. You will get extra points if you will, when the search engines calculate where to place you on their results page.

All of this may seem like a lot of work and quite frankly, it is. Luckily there are tools out on the Internet that will help you to optimize your webpage and to find other sites that will add your link/webpage to their site. Some of these people will want you to add their site to your page as well. This is known as a Reciprocal link and generally is free. 

One method that is taking off in the Newspaper industry is the pay per click or PPC. Pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results. When a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a fee ranging from $.02 per click to as much as $20 per click but this is your choice. Think of this as an auction for keywords and the highest bidder gets the highest placement on the Sponsored Links section of search engine results pages.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal on January 12, 2007 talking about how battling UK newspapers are buying PPC advertising on Google and others for about $.19 per click to increase traffic to their online newspaper in hopes to win more subscribers.

In this article, the WSJ said the UK newspaper “The Telegraph”, had hired consultants to boost its Google news appearances. The Telegraph also stated “The most important driver of all readers [to our site] is Google, except for people who know us and come directly”.

Finding what keywords your competitor is using and trying to figure out how much to pay per click can be a challenging task. However this is a task that must be done if you are trying to increase your readership. I use a windows program designed by Brad Callen called SEO Elite and Keyword Elite. This program can be reviewed and purchased at http://www.Keyword-SEO-Elite.com.

One of the very nice features of both SEO Elite and Keyword Elite is that they have a way for you to spy on your competition to see how well they are ranking for certain keywords and how much they are paying per click on Pay Per Click sites such as Google and Yahoo.

If you write for a newspaper and want to increase your readership, you must adhere to the SEO techniques and improve your web site's link popularity. This can be achieved by getting as many inbound, one-way links as you can from already established quality sites. Use the tools mentioned to increase the amount of traffic to your site in the least amount of time.