What is a news site trying to do?

1. What is a news site trying to do? • It’s trying to be an online version of a newspaper – which should be about good accurate journalism. Human eyes • It’s trying to be ‘on the front page of Google’ (whatever that means) – which is about SEO. Robot eyes • How do you reconcile those two?

2. Amateur or professional? • The standard Wordpress theme (Kubrick) • What can you do with Wordpress? • Can you make a newspaper with WP?

3. Do the nationals do it better? • The Sun, Daily Mail, Guardian, Telegraph, • BBC • Look at the layouts: simple, columnar, snippets of info. Cluttered? Do they hang together? Do the headlines tell the story? How much fits ‘above the fold’.

4. What can we do with a small site? • The Guardian • The Telegraph • East London Advertiser • SE1 • Everyblock – think about data journalism, and possibilities for hyperlocal

5. What does a website do that a paper cannot? • Immediacy, running stories. First thing I did this morning was sign in. • Feedback from readers – posting blog entries, photos, video, audio clips. • Rich content: maps, video, podcasts, galleries … all building context for story. • We can link to other authoritative sources. • Global reach.

6. What does a website do… • Flat front page … look at the snippets. Does this change the way I read a paper? • Any size – we aren’t limited by page count (also creates problems!). So infinite stories, infinite specialisms, whether trivial or affording greater depth.

7. What are the problems with that? • Straight to press. • Sketchy checking of facts. • When is a story finished? When do we pause for thought (Crimean War). • Readers get involved in debate … and there’s often more heat than light. • These are all the problems of ‘citizen journalism’. Everyone has a voice … but are all voices equally qualified?

8. Responsibilities • The web is full of rehashed, poorly checked, plagiarised, libellous, badly written copy … masquerading as journalism. As an online journalist you have the responsibility to be as good as print … or better. Print journalism emerged from the primordial slime, so can online.

9. How it used to be • The Times of London 1820

10. And some awful sites • Websites that suck • http://www.belladesoto.us • Daily Express

11. Find me a site that works… • Why? Look, feel, architecture, originality, niche market.

12. Doing it yourself…What experience do you have? • Writing • Photography • Blogging • Podcasting • Video • Graphic design • Coding

13. Planning • On paper not on the computer • Mindmap • Who’s it for? • What should it look like? • Text or graphics led? • National or local news? Niche interest • Pen and paper again … sketch your front

14. Plan a site • Any site … Pens, paper, computers, ideas

15. Register the domain • Walkthrough of GoDaddy

16. What do we build it in? • CSS/XHTML • Dreamweaver • CMS: Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal, Webs

17. Wordpress.com demo • Go to wordpress.com • Register blog name to your email address • Activate email link • Start posting • Change appearance in settings • Set your own banner picture

18. Wordpress.org demo • Go to Wordpress.org • Download WordPress • Check out the Wordpress plugins to personalise your site • Go to the WordPress five-minute install • Video of the five-minute install

19. SEO • The magic of Google’s algorithm • Keywords in text • Keyword in title • Keyword in domain • 300-word posts

20. Getting your site live • Bluehost, around £5pcm • Godaddy, from £5 for a domain • Check your domain is available before your brand your site! • OR … use a freebie such as wordpress.com or blogger.com

21. Biggest mistakes • Thinking it’s all about you. They want something (news) and you have to deliver • Not being clear what your site is … if they can’t tell you probably don’t know • Horrible, ugly design … look at how other people do it first • Putting design before content • Rubbish navigation … pity the reader

22. And more • Thinking it’s all about the technology • Thinking normal journalistic standards don’t apply to the web … see the Telegraph

23. Notice elements you can use… • Google maps • Blogs … a conversation with readers • Twitter feeds • Facebook page • Handheld video reports • Breakout pages to photo albums

24. Get in groups • Plan a site – it can be news or specialist interest • Sketch out a front page of your site • Block in stories • Show what media you’re going to use to spin off the stories – and how • How can you build traffic?

25. Getting traffic! • The crawler • The index • The interface

26. Which search engines …and how they work • You need to think Ask, Bing and Yahoo as well as Google. How do algorithms work? It’s a blind guessing game. Signal to noise ratio, stop words. Semantic indexing and constructing relevancy patterns. ‘Racket, ‘Wimbledon’, ‘ball’ might belong together. But ‘racket’ could be about noise prevention, ‘Wimbledon’ a Tube map and ‘ball’ about dancing. Semantics all build to results being both relevant and hard to game.

27. Old-fashioned SEO • Keyword stuffing in the page, cloaked within the page and in the meta tags. • Multiple iterations of the same page, drowning the SERPs. • Hijacking of pages, redirects etc. Misleading keywords in metas. • Black hat SEO. • Not totally dead but dying. Luckily you’re not selling Viagra, porn or mortgages … you don’t have to cheat.

28. Words of caution • Don’t expect to get rich. • Don’t think it’s easy. • Don’t think it’s quick. • It’s easier to build a good product and then find traffic than vice versa. Unless you want to dedicate your life to SEO forget about it. • The upside is that good content is the Holy Grail for SEOs … you are writing original, informative content. This is gold dust.

29. What Google wants now • Relevant content. Meaning? That the stuff on the page is relevant to the page title and congruent with the site. The site’s called ‘Recipes with lamb’ and you have a page selling Viagra … that’ll trip a Google alert. Remember the robots are backed up by humans. • Content with a low keyword density and a semantic congruity … again, they’re trying to fight gaming. • No duplicate content – you can have a percentage, rather like Turnitin.

30. So what’s the ideal copy? • Good journalism! Original quotes, on subject, lots of contingent phrases – eg it’s about Afghanistan and we mention ‘Helmand’, IEDs, Operation Enduring Freedom, Taliban etc etc. But not stuffed … surrounded by stop words and other noise. • And lots of pages with related (or not obviously spammy content) and which link together.

31. We have the material … how do we work it • Basics. Keyword match in page title, H1s and body copy, ideally repeated in each par. But natural! • Disregard the meta tags, though you can insert mis-spellings in here. It can’t hurt, it may work. Even construct a page for mis-spellings.

32. LINK! • The lifeblood of Google and the model others have copied. • Link to other people. • Solicit reciprocal links (caution). • Forget link farming, link building schemes. • Provide great content people want to link too. Be a niche. The Zulu Principle. • Internal linking, linking within page. • Post to forums and link back to your page.

33. Make it easy for people and robots • Linking internally is great for your readers and for the spiders. • Provide a site map (humans and spiders again). • Keyword in links. • Avoid using gifs as links. If you do, try to add a text link too – not useless but limited.

34. Give them a blog • Encourage people into a dialogue on the site. It builds content, it builds returners. And Google LOVES blogs. They get ranked quickly but it obviously becomes a zero sum. • Give them maps, video, podcasts, surveys, youtube tutorials, stuff they can download. Google indexes loads of this stuff.

35. Writing to order • Reverse engineer. Use Wordtracker. But you are a journalist not a marketer … know the difference. • You’re hitting the long tail here. But you may just do that anyway.

36. Organic versus PPC? • Can you afford PPC? Is there an advantage? Why not build the site organically and monetise it later. • Submit your site to the indexes – don’t pay for it, eventually they’ll find you anyway.

37. Business or pleasure? • Commercial sites don’t rank like information sites. Beware of putting ads on your site as this is a flag. Two arguments here … some will argue that Google loves sites with Google ads.

38. Summary • Good content • Page title, H1 and keyword in text, as link • Link • Give stuff away • Make your pages sticky – increase traffic within pages, build a site map • Age is authority, is security within the SERPs