Monthly Archives: March 2013

Online Marketing and SEO for News Websites

Journalism, Online Marketing, SEO

Today I returned to WINOL to see the students put together their weekly news bulletin as well as speak to them about SEO.

A fantastic effort by all, the quality of the news and production values have come a very long way since I was at WINOL!

Below is a document that outlines the main points we discussed today after the bulletin (you can download a PDF document of this using the link at the bottom of the page).

My main takeaways from today and the things I would love to see on WINOL next time I come back are:

  • Use separate page titles and headlines – one rational (for the search engines) and one for the users.
  • Write meta descriptions – short synopsis of story that is designed to be displayed in the search engine results.
  • Use image ALT tags – this is the best way for search engines to understand what your photojournalism is all about!
  • All reporters should start building up their online profiles using Google+ and linking this up with the content that is produced on WINOL – see this link for more info on making this work effectively – https://plus.google.com/authorship
  • Work on getting the site indexed in Google News by following the guidelines in my document and then submitting a ‘news sitemap’ to Google.
  • Use website crawlers to check the website for errors (broken links etc) and fix as much as possible to maintain a level of quality on the site.

All information can be found here:

Download: Online Marketing for News Websites.

It was great chatting to you all today and if you have any questions about SEO and online marketing send me a tweet!

Unique Selling Puff

Uncategorized

In my work as an online marketer I get to hear a lot about businesses.

One of the most common topics of conversation is the ‘USP’ (unique selling proposition / point).

There are two key things here:

  • Proposition is singular, not plural
  • Unique – not the same as anyone else

Yet every time we leave a meeting, the client has provided us with a long list of ridiculous things.

One tourism client I met recently had about 20 ‘USPs’.

One of them was; “beautiful location”.

Unless my client owns paradise I am pretty confident this is inaccurate.

I can forgive the client for not understanding the concept of what a unique selling proposition is but I certainly cannot forgive my colleague who diligently notes down this drivel.

The result of all of this puffery is that we end up with a project brief that weighs in like a novel and contains more waffle than a Dutch bakery.

I recently wrote about the common problems encountered with a project brief and how a ‘binary’ approach should be taken to make it more actionable.

A good place to start using ‘binary’ is with your USP.

One USP we are trying to push with this project.

One clear brief.

One happy team that understands the big picture.