Most journalists now work for organisations that have a digital presence and thus publish their work online, either themselves or with the help of the digital desk. Traffic numbers are being looked at as performance indicators by the organisations or journalists often are pretty interested in knowing how their stories perform online.

For the digital desk, more so if there’s a breaking news desk, real-time analytics, such as either the popular free tool Google Analytics or  a paid ones such as Chartbeat, are essential to decide on whether a story needs continued play or needs to be relegated to lower section of the landing pages. If traffic is slipping, tweaking of the headline and teaser text helps bring the story back in play. That is SEO.

Probably the most important channel for discovering a news story is via search engines, commonly, Google. Social Media platforms being the other channel that drives traffic. In the Indian context at least, Google News continues to play an important in the news teams efforts. If real-time analytics is relied on for the placement of stories, especially in landing pages (home page or section pages), the article is likely to get better direct traffic as well.

Tweaking the headlines, giving keywords since Google News still expects keywords, and tweaking the headlines are done routinely and for top stories probably more than once. These editorial chores are equally common in print, for instance, albeit for different reasons. Nevertheless, these common tasks sometimes is viewed with exasperation by the desk. The exasperation is not wholly unjustified. If the search engine behaves consistently to their inventions then I’m many would glad undertake such tweaks.

SEO can be almost as real-time as analytics, but journalists can largely keep an eye on analytics dashboards rather than something like this:

The SEO specialists should keep an eye on sensors like this, and, if need be, take step to ensure there is no negative impact on traffic because of a significant algorithm change by search engines (read Google).

What that also means is SEO is not set in stone.  It also means that processes that newsrooms evolve to have SEO Editorial synergies will also change or evolve. Synergy should mean that a story that is published has a fair chance to thriving online.

There are some quick and simple rules that can easily implemented by the desk. For example:

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