Smith: Newspapers need SEO 'to survive'

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on November 9, 2009 at 12:15 PM

Even as Rupert Murdoch today announced his more aggressive stance against online news aggregators, those on the other side of the aisle suggested that more, not less engagement with search engines might be a better solution.

Chris Silver Smith, director of optimisation strategies for KeyRelevance, today wrote that other than the biggest players in the dailies market, the newspapers he frequents to help with projects are usually not optimised for search engines. "It's hard to expressly invite a perceived enemy into your house on one hand while issuing invective against him on the other," he stated in his Search Engine Land column, using the example of newspapers' mixed feelings toward Google.

Smith points out that not long ago, newspapers perceived yellow page companies to be as much of a threat as they feel Google is today. Becoming more tech-savvy is the best tool, and currently newspapers have at their fingertips the possibilities of monetizing archives, as well as making on-site search better.

For search engines' spiders to better crawl, index, process and rank a page, Los Angeles Public Relations Firms recommends a few basics for Web sites looking to optimise:

Avoid deep pages (those three or more links away from the homepage)
Keep URLs simple
Avoid using frames
Use minimum number of unique links per page

LAPRF also notes that session IDs can make it difficult for spiders to crawl the site because spiders are unable to keep that information, and that pages accessed via "a submit button, drop down menu, login or through search" are usually unreachable for spiders.