Posts Tagged “SEO”

Mar 02 2011

Chapter 11 — Building a Digital Audience for News

Posted by rpaul2 in Assignments (Chapters), tags: , , , , ,

“Journalism needs to find new benefits from new marketing strategies and measurement tactics.”

Briggs’ last chapter in JournalismNext focuses in on “the fundamentals of building an audience online”:

  • Tracking one’s content
  • Web analysts
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Effective headline writing for the Web
  • Distribution through social media

Our author begins by pointing out that “management consultants will tell you that ‘what gets measured gets changed,'” but that “in recent years some have also said ‘what gets measured gets done.'”

As a result, “newsrooms now track and measure everything they do.”

Tracking everything that one publishes (and setting benchmarks on a case-by-case basis) is crucial, but tracking one’s audience (using Web analytics softwares such as Google Analytics.

Briggs then dives into the main functions of SEO for journalists:

  • Spiders and robots
  • Indexing
  • Queries

When writing effective headlines:

  • Make sure to write it for both online readers — readers and robots
  • Make good headlines better by improving keywords, trying to use more conversational language and not being afraid to inject a little attitude

Overall, in this last chapter, I took out a lot of information that I felt should be remembered as well as information that I found interesting (SEO functions).

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