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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the practices and strategies aimed to increase the visibility and traffic a website or a web page receives from search engine results. Search engines are one of the most widely used services to navigate the Internet and retrieve information from it. For instance, web pages and other content such as videos, photos, or images are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. SEO involves designing a website to make it appear in search engine results more frequently and more prominently. For news organizations, SEO is like displaying a print newspaper or a magazine on the front row of the newsstand. This entry discusses search algorithms, the use of SEO in journalism, concerns raised by SEO tactics and efforts to deal with them, and recent developments in search engine technology.

Search engines are an important source of the traffic to many news websites. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, search remained a significant gateway to the news in many countries as of 2019, including Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. The American Press Institute reported in 2014 that about half of Americans said they received news in the previous week from search engines and online news aggregators.

In general, the higher and more frequently a news website appears in the search engine results page (SERP), the more visitors it will have from the search engine’s users. Researchers have found that the first Google search results page generates as much as 92% of all traffic from an average search.

As more people depend upon the web for news, search engines are becoming increasingly influential news gatekeepers. As a result, it is important for news organizations and journalists to understand the importance of optimizing content for the web and utilizing SEO. News organizations are even restructuring news production processes to deal with the new challenges they face because of news users’ increasing reliance on search engines.

Search Algorithms

Search engines employ algorithms to find and collect information about web pages. Search engines use complex algorithms that can give access to resources users may not otherwise be aware of or familiar with. In general, a search algorithm is a problem-solving procedure that takes the user’s word or phrase, sifts through a vast database of cataloged keywords with their URLs, and then returns a listing of best-matching web pages according to the search criteria.

Though specifics of search algorithms are not always made public, they generally take as input a sequence of words (search terms) and return as output links to web pages that contain the most relevant information the user seeks. Because search terms may be equivocal or applicable to multiple subjects, or because multiple people looking for the same information might enter substantially different search terms, search engines develop very particular sets of rules whereby they guide inputted search terms into proper directions to locate the requested information.

Any search engine has a crawler that collects information about all the content it can find on the Internet. Crawlers referred to as spiders visit web pages and index the information in a database. Search engine algorithms, then, identify, from a search’s textual input, what to select from the search engine’s index of the web to return an output. These algorithms decide, from the multitude of web pages that contain some or all of the search terms, which to rank higher and which to rank relatively lower in the output. The decisions a search engine makes in this process inevitably prefer some information and rule out other information.

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