Empowering journalists and watching trends: Telegraph and Times talk search

The slow process of optimising a newspaper's content to improve its rankings in natural search has no doubt aided the huge year-on-year growths in unique users posted by several national newspapers in February's Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) report.

For Telegraph.co.uk, which recorded 113.04 per cent year-on-year growth, and Times Online with a 51.93 per cent rise year-on-year, different SEO strategies have brought benefits to users and in terms of traffic growth, their heads of search told an Association of Online Publishers (AOP) forum yesterday.

Telegraph.co.uk
Training staff in search optimisation techniques has been at the heart of the operation led by Julian Sambles, head of audience development at the Telegraph.

It's about empowering journalists, he says: "By using this approach what we have done is given our journalists the knowledge and understanding that they need so they can apply it to their daily production process and make informed decisions about content when they're writing or publishing it."

Thinking about search should be 'a hygiene factor' in writing and publishing every Telegraph.co.uk story, says Sambles.

To achieve this, tasks that improve an article for search engines, such as drafting web headlines or adding tags, are being integrated into journalists' roles to help streamline the production process, he adds.

"These are editorial decisions made by those who should be making them," says Sambles.

"We have not only improved their skill sets, but they can now reach out to new niche audiences."

Sambles has also created a support team to help advise journalists about SEO techniques and to give advice on a story-by-story basis.

The SEO overhaul of the site, which began in June 2007, has seen traffic to the site triple in a year-an-a-half.

Times Online
Following a lengthy process of tagging and tidying the site's archived content, for example changing page titles to more web-friendly descriptions, the Times is using trend analysis to boost its search strategy, Drew Broomhall, head of search, told the event.

Identifying gaps can drive the editorial agenda on the site, says Broomhall. Competitors sites are monitored to see what crossover the Times has and what it isn't writing about, while trends in search terms can also lead to relevant content.

The title's Recession Calculator was a direct response to a growing number of searches for 'recession' and 'calculator', says Broomhall.

Built for free by one of the site's advertising partners, the calculator rose to number three in Google UK's search results for the term 'recession'.

The project wasn't about gaining one click from users, but providing them with sufficient relevant content to refer them around the site, explains Broomhall.

Monitoring such data and the ways that people are searching, such as by asking questions or 'natural language' searches, is particularly important, he says.

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