It's great content that matters, not optimisation

It's everything a good, tabloid headline should be: witty, memorable and defines the story (to a point). It absolutely draws you in. But I'd doubt it's SEO friendly.

Newspapers, which want to attract as many people as possible to their sites, have been looking at how to tailor copy to attract the search engines, employing SEO agencies to train their staff, with some even creating internal search roles.

This week, though, Mirror.co.uk said it would move away from this SEO-focused approach for its 3am.co.uk gossip site and towards ensuring it created copy that attracted a loyal audience.

A spokesman told new media age, "You need to have an audience but obviously we'd prefer a loyal and engaged audience rather than chasing numbers."

Much has been made of whether the Mirror is being revolutionary here and whether the move could backfire on the paper.

The basics for SEO copy are to use keywords and phrases in common usage that the search engines recognise, prompting them to index the page. But link-building, tagging and so on are just as important.

The Mirror is unlikely to stop doing any of these things. Indeed, the 3am brand is strong within celebrity and gossip circles, so I'd imagine it'll always achieve a high level of sites linking or referring to its stories.

For me, the Mirror's move is more about newspapers wanting loyal users who'll repeatedly come back, rather than a rejection of established SEO practice. The Mirror knows the 3am site will always gain traffic as it's promoted heavily within the physical paper as well as on Mirror.co.uk.

If you create great content, whether optimised or not, people will always find and link to it.

Published by: Will Cooper

Published 11th September, 2009

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