SEO Can Make or Break a Blog

No matter what I write, I will always have an automatic audience. Unfortunately, if I want to expand my readership (preferably to include more than those who have the same last name, and DNA, as me), I have to take special care to help make a search engine’s job a bit easier.

Josh Hatch, a multimedia producer at USA Today and an adjunct professor at American University’s School of Communication, explained the idea of SEO, or search engine optimization. According to Hatch, a blogger or Web site’s publisher can use techniques, such as creating clear headlines that include main terms and keywords from the story, in order to make it easier to attract the notice of search engines and their users.

Hatch explains how we can best optimize readers’ search results:

I’ve always known that headline writing is not one of my strengths, but after learning about how important they truly are in the digital age (search engines rank the information in the headline higher than keywords included in tags; headlines are expected to be a better representation of what the story is actually about), I realize that I can no longer neglect this skill. It will be one of my goals in bootcamp and during the coming semesters to work on my headline writing.

Hatch also discussed the usefulness of social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, for journalists. While we cannot assume that an account in a public official’s name was truly created by them, these sites can prove useful in providing tips that could then turn into stories if substantiated. Social networks also provide outlets for authors to share their work and for readers to pass an interesting article on to their friends and followers.

Learning a New Language

David Johnson explaining the complexities of CSS and html.

I would not be surprised if much of my class time studying journalism at AU is spent discussing language and how to use it effectively. Today, my classmates and I learned that this doesn’t just include using nouns and verbs correctly.

Our second day of bootcamp started out easily enough with a review of grammar rules and the intricacies of AP Style. As a former writing tutor and copy editor, this was familiar, even comfortable, territory for me. My feeling of well-being evaporated as soon as I entered the computer lab and saw Professor David Johnson waiting to introduce us to html.

After demonstrating what the pioneers of the online world had to put up with in order to create the world wide web (where, as I learned the hard way, leaving out the smallest symbol renders the entire code meaningless), Johnson assured us that creating Web pages has gotten easier (though still complicated).

The tools of the modern journalist.

Although I have never known life without computers, it was not until today that I truly began to appreciate what went into creating the programs I take for granted. Today’s exercise with html and Dreamweaver may have left me with a headache, but they also left me with a sense of excitement that I might, one day, feel at ease with this unfamiliar side of the Internet.