Recently, Danny Sullivan posted a story that SEO Makes Front Page of Los Angeles Times. This particular story caught my eye since Larry previously blogged about The Shrinking World of Newspapers.

As evidence of this trend, the Times story It’s Web 101 for this experienced intern describes how former TV Guide magazine editor Lois Draegin lost her job and is now an unpaid intern at The Women on the Web.

“The Women on the Web,” or WOW, needed Draegin’s magazine-world wisdom, and she needed their guidance through a maze of technology that was as baffling to her as hieroglyphics. In a search for a new job in the media, she had suddenly found herself techno-challenged. She didn’t know a URL from SEO.

It wasn’t until she was teamed up with Randi Bernfeld at WOW that she understood the obsession with terms such as search engine optimization (a method to increase traffic to a website) or used Google Trends to pick story topics and write a uniform resource locater (Web address).

Previously,

. . . she hadn’t bothered to learn such skills as writing tags and URLs because she was paid to think globally about the direction of her magazine. Now she had to think globally not only about each topic but about every word she wrote in the URL, headline, subhead, tag and links in the story.
Everything had to be crafted to draw readers.

“It’s really a challenge to do all of that at once,” Draegin said.

As Mr. Sullivan said:

As part of her new job, she’s discovered that how people search — and maintaining a search friendly web site — is an essential part of the content process.

Bookmark: