Mashable has a post on bad, good, better and best practice when writing headlines for SEO.

The advice is at this link.

Journalism.co.uk runs a one-day course on SEO, a practical guide to getting your work found. The next one takes place in June.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to set up a recording studio
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – How to request a Google+ profile for your news site
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – inspiring audio slideshows made by students
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 10 search tricks you might not know
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – making the most of LinkedIn groups

Tool of the week: Searchmetrics Essentials

What is it? A tool to test your news site’s SEO and social rankings

How is it of use to journalists? Searchmetrics is a paid-for tool to allow you to see your site’s SEO and social rankings.

Journalism.co.uk used it to discover the top 10 Twitter and top 10 Facebook stories of 2011.

Full access costs around £150 per month but you can now have limited access for free with last week’s release of Searchmetrics Essentials.

Type in your domain name and you will be able to see your SEO ranking. For example, typing in Journalism.co.uk shows we are number one search result for “journalism jobs” and number one for “journalism”.

• Searchmetrics: Financial Times is news outlet with most Google+ followers
• Tool of the week for journalists – Facebook Search
• Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: Google site search
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Gawker’s new traffic metric measures ‘reader affection’

The Los Angeles Times is the only major US newspaper to have a website that is increasing in traffic year-on-year, according to the site’s senior editor.

In this podcast Journalism.co.uk technology correspondent Sarah Marshall speaks to Jimmy Orr, managing editor of the LATimes.com about how appointing SEO chief Amy Hubbard has led the site to record traffic. As well as discussing Hubbard’s day-to-day role, Orr offers his advice on SEO strategy and outlines his optimism for the news industry.

We also hear from SEO expert David Amerland on how the different strategies of the Guardian and the Mail Online have resulted in traffic success and how other news organisations have struggled to move from print to the online world.

This podcast is the second in a two-part series on headline writing and SEO.

You can find a guide on how to get to grips with SEO as a journalist, how to write great headlines the work for SEO and more from David Amerland on the state of the UK newspaper industry.

You can sign up to our iTunes podcast feed for future audio.

• Globe and Mail: Misunderstanding web metrics can cause lazy journalism
• Online Journalism Scandinavia: Print and online integration ‘not the key to success’
• Malcolm Coles: How US traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites
• Channel 4 News video: Lionel Barber on news’ paid-for future
• #jpod: How news organisations are using Pinterest

For some time within the industry there has been an often lively debate about the impact of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) on online news. Just recently the Los Angeles Times took on a new SEO chief, whose job it is to build newspaper headlines fit for the internet, by ensuring they’re web-friendly and searchable.

The new role has been credited with contributing to a 65 per cent rise in traffic from search and a 41 per cent jump in traffic from Google compared to this time last year, according to a report by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

So does SEO’s demand for keywords really take the art out of headline writing?

Journalism.co.uk’s technology correspondent Sarah Marshall speaks to SEO consultant Malcolm Coles and Duane Forrester, senior product manager at Bing to find out more.

• #jpod: SEO success stories – the LA Times on its traffic hike
• Nieman: Blogs, SEO chief and Facebook comments result in traffic increase for LA Times
• #jpod: How journalists can best use Facebook pages
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – use Storify’s new search feature
• #jpod: What is the best time and frequency to post to Twitter and Facebook?

The Point to Point blog has an excellent article about how witty headlines and SEO can go hand-in-hand. Dominic Litten explains how many news sites have the ability to put the SEO-friendly headline in a separate field to the witty headline.

For many journalists, SEO = headline + keyword stuffing. It’s all they know. However, if journalists really want to know and understand how SEO can help them and their publications they should worry a lot less about the importance of headlines and focus on their company’s sitemaps, site architecture, endless duplicate content, internal linking and the like.

Litten goes on to say:

We get the love for your headlines, we’re just over it. SEO didn’t kill the cute headline, the click did. The sheer volume of content, growing exponentially and shared on social media, rendered the witty and non-descriptive headline useless. We consume media so radically differently than we once did, so why are some  journalists clinging to out-dated best practices?

The full article is at this link.

• NYT: Will an obsession with SEO kill off the clever headline?
• The LA Times on the role of its SEO chief – ‘the key is feedback’
• Five tips for writing an effective press release
• Newmediabytes: How to write web headlines that catch search engine spiders
• Jakob Nielsen: World’s best web headlines come from BBC

For some top tips on how to establish a successful SEO setup beyond editorial efforts check out this list on the news:rewired website from Frank Gosch, global SEO lead at Microsoft for MSN, looking at the six major areas that every site should work on in order to provide the best search performance. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – analysing Twitter accounts
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – topical link posts
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – SEO tips for bloggers
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – taking mobile photos
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – improve website page speeds

The battle to increase audiences is hardly a new challenge facing the media environment. Whether print readers, radio listeners or television viewers, it has generally been a case of the more the merrier.

In the world of online journalism, where there is instant access to page view and retweet counters, the ‘success’ of a story has perhaps come to be defined by these metrics. Howard Kurtz, columnist for the Washington Post, has an interesting post on the site this morning discussing the potential impact of this environment on the work of online journalists and the resulting balancing act between appealing to the search engine and maintaining a quality brand.

Naturally, those who grew up as analog reporters wonder: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest? Does this mean pieces about celebrity sex tapes will take precedence over corruption in Afghanistan? Why pay for expensive foreign bureaux if they’re not generating enough clicks?

Doesn’t all this amount to pandering?

Potentially, sure. But news organizations such as the Post and the Times have brands to protect. They can’t simply abandon serious news in favor of the latest wardrobe malfunction without alienating some of their longtime readers. What they gain in short-term hits would cost them in long-term reputation.

See his full post here…

• Frontline Blog: 10 ways to make it as a stringer
• NYTimes.com: FBI obtained reporters’ phone records
• Social and mainstream media join forces to cover Afghanistan election
• Reuters: Washington Post closes US bureaux
• Window on the Media: ‘I smell a government rat in my news’

The challenges facing locally and nationally owned publications are the subject of a post on the Online Journalism Review website by Robert Niles, who follows up on a previous post in which he questions the future of AOL’s hyperlocal start-up Patch.com and other national chains.

Niles ha previously claimed that locally-owned publications today have cost advantages which outweigh the “economies of scale” of national chains of local publishers. But pushed by a reader to come up with advantages for national chains which could make them more profitable, he puts forward two ideas as a starting point for further debate, shown in summary below.

National training

A smart, focused national training program could help reduce the time it takes a local editor to produce an engaging website. Local website publishers who don’t have access to such training will take longer to get up to speed.

Search engine optimization

A national chain can give its local publishers an advantage by arranging for aggressive cross-linking among its sites. That creates a potentially huge number of inbound links, helping push the chain’s sites ahead of its local competitors. In addition, by building a national brand for local news, the chain might be able to elicit more in-bound links to its sites from outside the network.

See his full post here…

• OJR: Online journalism or journalism online?
• Jeff Jarvis on mobile journalism
• OJR: Interview with chief news officer of hyperlocal news site OurTown
• OJR: An interview with Washington DC’s new local news platform
• Online writers respond to Pulitzer announcement

It’s possible that SEO types have a sense of humour. Evidence comes courtesy of the Daily Mail, which has hidden a job advert for an SEO manager inside a file that should only really be read by search engine crawlers.

The job ad was discovered by eagle-eyed SEO man Malcolm Coles in a robot.txt file, which blocks the crawlers from indexing certain parts of the site.

Disallow: /home/ireland/
Disallow: /home/scotland/

# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!
# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline dot co dot uk

# Begin standard rules
# Apply rules to all user agents updated 08/06/08
ACAP-crawler: *

Very clever. People who don’t read these kind of things need not apply, obviously.

• Early problems with ACAP
• ACAP answers its critics
• Eric Schmidt – Google resistance to ACAP based on technology
• Ian Douglas: Response to ACAP answering its critics
• #followjourn: @lucytobin – city reporter/freelance

#followjourn: @christiandunn

Who? Christian Dunn, former digital editor at NWN Media and now freelance journalist, SEO consultant, web site manager, mutli-media producer, and, er, geo-engineering PhD student.

Where? Christian publishes a blog on Science, web, SEO and journalism. He also has a Flickr page. Christian wrote a two part feature for Journalism.co.uk in 2008 on writing for the web: Part 1 / Part 2.

On Twitter: @christiandunn

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

• #FollowJourn: @christiandunn/digital news editor
• #FollowJourn: @welshrosie/hyperlocal writer
• #FollowJourn: @lizbolshaw/freelance journalist
• #followjourn: @ITVLauraK – Laura Kuenssberg/journalist
• #FollowJourn: @andyoakes/publisher

Krishna Bharat, founder of Google News, told an industry conference last week that it was the search giant’s “editorial responsibility” to protect hard news’ place in a more personalised news agenda.

I think people care about what other people are interested in, most importantly in their social circle (…) but beyond that the world at large. I think there is an influential, intellectual component to our audience that cares very much about getting the hard news of the day. I don’t think there is a risk of us personalising so much that we keep the hard news out the picture. We have an editorial responsibility not to do that.

Chris Horrie from the University of Winchester’s journalism school was at the the IJ-7 ‘Innovation Journalism’ conference at Stanford University last week and grabbed Bharat for a quick interview afterwards, in which the head of Google News gave his advice to journalists on writing for the web and search engines:

• Journalism students collaborate on election night coverage using Skype and Livestream
• Will Google News build filters for ‘content farms’?
• Kevin Kelleher: ‘Does Google even understand what news is?’
• Paul Gambaccini: BBC Radio 1 fails to recognise its ‘incredible responsibility’ by keeping Moyles in a job
• #tjcardiff: Follow Cardiff University’s Tomorrow’s Journalists conference

Is search engine optimisation ringing the death knell for the poetry of headline writing? Successful web headlines are, according to New York Times blogger David Carr, a “long way from the poetics of the best of print headlines”. But, he goes on to argue, there is a middle ground between the witty headline aimed at a thinking brain and the information stuffed headline aimed at a processing algorithm. And while Carr’s own headline – “Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline” – does not quite stand up in the information delivery stakes, it does score pretty high on both wit and SEO.

Don’t know who Taylor Momsen is? Neither do I, beyond that she is the mean one on “Gossip Girl.” But Facebook knows her well, Twitter loves her, and she and Google have been hooking up, like, forever.

One more fact about Ms. Momsen: she has nothing to do with this column, let alone the headline. But her very name is a prized key word online — just the thing to push my column to the top of Google rankings.

Full post at this link…

• The LA Times on the role of its SEO chief – ‘the key is feedback’
• Point to Point: Why SEO shouldn’t get the blame for boring headlines
• Five tips for writing an effective press release
• Nieman Journalism Lab: HuffPo’s A/B headline testing
• Guardian: Perez Hilton to blog for ITV

Social Media today shares five articles on social search to help you get to grips with SEO and its relationship with social media at this link. Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – managing social media time
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – tracking a conversation on Facebook
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – alternatives to Google
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – don’t forget the forums
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk

SEO news tips by Econsultancy blogger and director of search at SEOptimise Kevin Gibbons: “As long as it’s done well, SEO will not make your articles unreadable,” he says.

Journalist’s guide to SEO at this link…

• Five tips for writing an effective press release
• #followjourn: @lakey/editor-in-chief
• #FollowJourn: Charlie Beckett/journalist and director
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – dive into the data journalism handbook
• Tool of the week for journalists: Data.gov.uk’s map-based search

SEO: Google News has released a series of tips and video advice on optimising your website for Google News. The video at this link helps explain how the aggregator works and how to get your content found. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – optimise search for your readers
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – video reporting from conferences
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to monitor your online competition
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – launching your own magazine
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – positioning Google ads