SEO for News Publications or Media Websites

Hello there and welcome to a new very special edition of Crawling Mondays dedicated to SEO and news. What is different for a news publication from an SEO perspective, right? And today to speak up about this very important but also very niche-oriented type of topic, 2 very prominent and very experienced SEO specialists who have worked in an industry for quite a while and at different sides of things too. On one hand, John Shihata, VP of Audience Development and many other areas including SEO at Condé Nast and also founder of an SEO news tool that is called NewsDash. And then on the other hand, Barry Adams, the one and only technical SEO, highly experienced in news SEO, independent SEO consultant and founder of Polemic Digital. Thank you very much for joining.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks, this is great.

Yes, so let's start. The first question, right, just to describe a little bit to all of the audience who are experienced in SEO but have never done an SEO process for a news publication, a news website. What is different? What are those unique steps or areas that are very specific when you do an SEO process for a news type of website.

News is a bit of a different animal anyway because for me it's as close to real-time SEO as you can get. Where most SEO campaigns I've been involved in that are not news tend to focus on getting in those 10 blue links, maybe getting a featured snippet. With news, it tends to focus very heavily on the top stories carousel on regular search results. The news.google.com vertical in itself doesn't actually send an awful lot of traffic to most news publishers. It's that top stories box on desktop and mobile search results, which happens in about 10 to 12% of all Google queries, that they will have a news box with news articles for publishers in there. That's the majority of organic search traffic to most news publishers. And there are some specific rules about that Top Stories box that make it very, very different from regular SEO. For one, the maximum lifespan of an article in Top Stories is 48 hours. And I think, John, you probably have better data on this than I do. Usually it's 24 to 36 hours maximum that an article will live in Top Stories and then it'll be replaced by other articles. So for me, optimizing for news is optimizing primarily for really fast crawling and indexing, removing as many obstacles for Google as possible so that you don't have to rely on Google's secondary or tertiary indexing mechanisms. But that first-pass indexing that Google does the moment it crawls an article is all it really needs to do to get the full article text, full article relevance, all the structured data. And the second aspect is about building long-term topical value for any news website so that Google understands that this news publisher is an expert in, for example, financial news. That publisher is great in sports and football because that tends to filter into that top stories rankings as well as general SEO so that Google wants to reward websites that are known to report on a specific topic with regularity and with authority so that they get surfaced more and more often versus like a general news publisher that just writes about everything and everyone without really focusing on any specific topic.

What are the must-do steps? Like, for example, it took my attention that you didn't mention AMP there because still today, for good or forget, that's still a requirement to be included in the top stories carousel, right? So a must—

On mobile, purely on mobile.

So for now still, this is going to— it wasn't announced that it's going to be change next year at some point, the requirement will be to be fast and provide a good user experience. But right now it's AMP. What is the other type of must-do requirement or implementation that really needs to be done for this type of website? Yes, Jaap.

So I think I agree with Barry in every single point he mentioned, right? It's when we look at news publishers, right, and I'm going to address the AMP right now. When we look at news publishers, there is like 2 different or 3 different categorizations. You have the breaking news publishers, right? You're talking about the CNN, the Fox News, right? The ones that produce a ton of content and they have supporting contextual arm from videos and so on, right? And they cover every single aspect of all the news, right? So the speed is the name of the game here. Breaking news, right? Being first and being accurate is very important for them. You have the niche publishers, as Barry mentioned, right? So you have someone who's very focused on one specific niche. It could be technology, or it could be everything Mac, or it could be everything finance, or everything health, and so on. So they're very focused on the authority, being very authoritative on that specific topic, right? And then the third category, so you have breaking news, you have the lifestyle. And the lifestyle is still a kind of publishers that they don't write much about breaking news, but it's more like about newsy but a little bit evergreen kind of content, right? It's like their publication, so they're not after the breaking news and being first, but they're after like something new that the users didn't know about the celebrity or a certain way of living and so on. So these are the 3 things, and I would say that Each publisher has a different approach to search. I would say when it comes to AMP, I love AMP, me personally, since it started. I think I got Condé Nast one of the very first partners on AMP. So when AMP started, it was powered by RSS feeds, for people who didn't know that, where we would give Google an RSS feed. And they will take all these AMP URLs and surface it into their AMP stores or news carousels. And now we have moved way far. I think I love AMP because it's fast. When I think of a user experience, and publishers are very guilty of sometimes bad user experience and very slow web pages. You look at their number of callouts on average in any publisher, it exceeds 150 external callouts. AMP was a much-needed solution for users who want, in the mobile age, to view pages very quickly. Till today, AMP is required to be on Top Stories, which brings most of the traffic. But starting in 2021, we don't know when exactly, Google will remove the requirement to have an AMP story to be in Top Stories. This doesn't mean that the next day publishers will turn it off and call it a day. This really what means is AMP Stories will be evaluated against mobile pages and whoever have the best vital core signals will win. So if you don't fix your own mobile pages and they're still slow, AMP's still your lifeline. This is the most of the traffic you get from top stories. So if you fix your mobile pages and it's on par with your AMP pages and they're doing good and you test a little bit, you don't just turn it off, you test on a section, you test for a few days and you see you're getting the same amount of traffic or higher, then you start going away from AMP. Because the problem with AMP, it doesn't produce the same revenue as mobile pages. It doesn't convert as mobile and so on. So that's why a lot of publishers Understood.

One important topic here, because at the end of the day, if AMP ended up existing, right, was because— and I have to say, it's true that this is not a particular issue of only publications, right? But let's be honest, publications are some of those websites that have potentially the worst user experience, intrusive type of experience at the end of the day, very heavy reliance on ads. slow loading times as a consequence, right? So this was like, let's say, a workaround. What would you say in the future, right? AMP is not a requirement anymore, you will be able to be there without AMP if you are up to being able to optimise your experience, your speed. Do you think that publications, now that that will be viable and a possibility, will commit and will prefer to move and do real efforts on improving speed and experience on the websites to avoid having to rely on AMP or no? Do you think that they will want to continue relying on AMP for that?

I think it depends on the resources available within any given publisher. I know some publishers for whom AMP is a very easy implementation, sometimes even powered by one or two plugins because, for example, they built it off a WordPress platform, in which case maintaining that AMP development track makes perfect sense because it's very low effort, very low investment with a high payoff. And it means that they don't have to worry too much about mobile speed optimization. For other developers, especially the ones who built their site on legacy systems who have multiple layers of technology stacks, maintaining that AMP infrastructure can be very costly also because the standard tends to evolve. What was valid AMP 2 years ago is not necessarily valid AMP now. And it can be a real pain in the rear end to maintain that that level and make sure the AMP articles stay valid. And for those, it might be more worthwhile to say, right, we might just pause the AMP development track, keep it there but not actively update it, and then switch more resources into making the regular mobile experience as fast as possible, ticking all those Core Web Vitals boxes to make sure you fall well below the required thresholds and see if you can find a sort of a switchover point Where you can say, right, let's test the AMP version versus the non-AMP optimized version to see if we can get similar visibility levels. And then they can retire AMP in the long run. I fully agree with John. Once that requirement for AMP for mobile top stories disappears, developers are not going to just flick a switch and ditch AMP altogether. That is going to be a gradual process. And I think that some publishers will just keep AMP because it's easier and it sort of guarantees that optimized aspect for mobile because of the optimizations that Google does on their end anyway in the AMP cache and that quick flicking through the top stories carousel that AMP enables. But for other publishers, they might make a different decision in the long run and say, right, we've sunk so much resources into the AMP technology stack that it's not feasible for us to keep doing that if the payoff isn't necessarily there. We might just want to ditch it in the long run and go from a phased approach to get rid of AMP, maybe even section section by section or something like that.

Yeah.

But they can say, right, let's just get rid of it and just focus everything on the main site. Which was my problem with AMP in the first place. If Google really wanted to reward fast mobile experiences, they already had a mechanism to measure load speed and measure mobile usability. But they decided, no, you know what? We're going to launch a parallel web standard and shove that down publishers' throats or otherwise they can kiss mobile search traffic goodbye. And then make everybody adopt that. And then 4 years later they said, ah, you know what, we're gonna just let that one go and slowly start to retire that in typical Google fashion.

Yeah. And I would say to Barry's point, right? Google cares about Google, right? So let's put this out there, right? And secondly, they care about their users. Everything else comes after, right? So if they care about how they index content very fast, and give their users a better, faster user experience, they would introduce a whole new language the publishers have to get with massive restrictions. So I can see it from their view, but to Barry's point, it was very tough for the publishers. Now publishers have to evaluate 3 things before they disable AMP: revenue, resources, and traffic. These are the 3 things that they look at. So when it comes to revenue, it's commercial revenue and consumer revenue. Do they have subscriptions, paywalls? Is it mainly all commerce based on ad impressions and so on? So this is one thing that they need to evaluate. 2, resources, development resources. Is it easy as a WordPress plugin which powers 33% of the web? So just leave it on, it's not hurting us and it keeps updated by itself. 3, revenue, resources, traffic. Traffic is like when you start doing these tests, are you getting the same amount of traffic or not? Because a lot of traffic coming from top stories. So my approach to this is after you evaluate these 3, you start with a section. First, you start by disabling AMP after X days. I think this is a very interesting test where you say, After 7 days, I'm going to disable AMP, or after 3 days, because as we know, Top Stories, as Barry mentioned, it lasts 2 to 3 days, 48 hours to 72 hours, right? So after this, you don't need it in Top Stories anymore, and it has its own life in organic results, right? So see if you do this, the lifespan or the shelf life of AMP Stories is still the same or going down. The second thing after you do this test is you disable a section. So let's take everything in business, a medium traffic section, right? If we disable AMP completely there, how is it performing? Is it the same or less? And then after these 2 and based on all the other 3 factors, publishers then need to make a decision, should they support AMP still or not?

These are great criteria to take into consideration for sure, assessing all of the different aspects because of course at the end of the day, it should be worthy from ROI perspective.

Yes.

It's money, revenue.

That's what matters, yes.

Yeah, indeed. So moving on to another very important critical aspect here: speed, crawlability, and indexability, especially for those type of news websites that rely on trends and hot type of stories, right? And the whole process to make it happen, right? That, for example, is it really critical to send a feed to Google through the Publishing Center or not necessarily so much? Or which are the tools that you use to monitor trends or new stories that are coming? What is the type of workflow that you tend to have in regard to that and what are the tools and resources that you leverage to have the whole fast crawling, indexing, identifying topic and writing about it? Which is, I see that it's a lifecycle going ongoing like this, right?

Yeah, it's an interesting one. It varies from publisher to publisher, but I think most publishers, especially in the breaking news category like John said, are very much focused at covering what's happening, what's trending at the moment. You know, in terms of deciding what topics to use, Google Trends is always a good one. But, you know, you need to look at the trending topics in Google News itself, which is where John's NewsDash tool comes in really handy. Google actually, it was last week I think, launched the Realtime Content Insights dashboard which you can connect to Google Analytics and you can see exactly which articles are being read on your website and how many people are looking at it, which can be a very handy dashboard to have in the newsroom. But it doesn't tell you what you're not covering. So that's always important. You need to know as a publisher what the current news is on what on the topics that you want to cover, where you're ranking, if you're ranking for it, and especially what the gaps are. You know, the rankings you've just lost, for example, or topics that are trending which you could write about but you don't have an article on at the moment. And that's about building those workflows into your editorial structure in such a way that it doesn't necessarily take away from your core journalism, but, you know, maybe you have some dedicated people who either send those things out to journalists or some news publishers I work with have a specific SEO news desk which is focused on that, that then can either publish these articles on their own accord or collaborate with the journalists to get an article written in case there is such a gap and there needs to be some quick action there. Which is one of the things that I really enjoy about working in news because like we said before, it is such a fast-moving industry. And whenever you make an improvement in news, be it on the technical side or the content side, you tend to know within a couple of days whether or not it's working. It's not like regular SEO where you need to wait 3 months to a year before you tend to see the payoff. This is really fast-moving stuff. And that can also sometimes go the wrong way when you do something that has the opposite effect of what you wanted to do and you see that traffic fall off a cliff, which is which you don't want, of course. So it's, you know, I think in the long run, a lot of publishers will tend to gravitate towards very similar editorial processes because those are the tried and tested mechanisms and tend to work the best. But it also tends to differ based on the type of publisher, like John outlined those 3 main types of publishers. For niche publishers, they tend to focus a little bit less on the breaking news because they have a bit more of a long-term view and the lifestyle especially is not focused on the breaking news. But there was always that opportunity once in a while, like for example, if you cover video games as a publisher, there's a couple of events every year like the BlizzCon event where you will want to have that live feed, that live coverage, or whenever PlayStation launches a new console or whatever. So it's about finding that sort of a balance between Building that long-term value and having that good editorial approach that you don't miss the opportunities that quick-fire news can offer.

The real-time SEO, which is a whole different game in itself, that gives the SEOs the immediate satisfaction of seeing results more or less like SEM. So traditional SEO, you optimize things and you wait for a month to see it happening. With news, it's like you running a paid campaign. You do stuff and you see the traffic immediately. So this instant gratification is really nice. Now, when it comes to the technical thing, I think publishers should use every weapon at their arsenal to get crawled fast and indexed fast and rank fast. I think in the past we used to use even Google+ because we saw when we put something in Google+, it gets crawled after a couple of seconds. So whatever is there. I look at my log files. So I have 18 brands that I look at, right? Log files. And then I analyze how long— what's the period between the time we publish an article and it gets crawled by Google, right? And then I try to see all the different factors that can minimize this time. Is it a link on the home page that makes the crawling faster? If you remember USA Today, where on the sidebar they were like having older content with fresh timestamps on the homepage and Google starts presenting those because they're on homepage. If adding an RSS feed to Google Search Console works, Google News XML sitemaps, testing with the live API. Right now it should be only for jobs and events and so on, but I have seen people testing it for other types of content and it works. So there's a lot of ways that you can push content to Google very fast. The other thing also, Google is taking into consideration user expectations. If you search for sports, users are expecting ESPN in the results. Which means Google will get out of their way, even if the site is good or bad technically, right, to get the content from there. I know a couple of sites that their technical infrastructure is not that great, but users were expecting that that site appears for that search. So they will do their best, they will render their JavaScript for them, they will do everything to make sure that they get their content into the search results. So there are some user expectations, but these are what I call the golden sites. There are very few in every niche, doesn't apply to 99% of the users. When it comes to the workflow, the challenge is what I call file and lock mentality. Once we write about something, we forget about it and we move to the next story. But a lot of times breaking news are evolving stories. If there's someone— if there's— I give you this example. If there is a shooting in some small town in a state, right, usually it starts with everyone searching for that school name or that city name plus shooting, right? So this is what you focus on. Then the trends start shifting. Because it becomes national news and the TV is talking about it. So people are not searching specifically for that city name or high school name. It gets a little bit broader, maybe the state name or the county name, right, or whatever the media starts using. And then they find the number, the name of the shooter, but then the shift starts shifting to who is this guy, right? So you have to keep an eye for the shifts in the trends, right? So trends is extremely important. Shameless plug is like we track trends all the time and we give the gaps between what trends you cover versus your competitors and so on. So trends is very important.

You're talking about NewsDash, your tool?

Yes, NewsDash. Yes.

Yeah. NewsDash, you also provide this, the gap of what you're actually covering already The trending topics versus your competitors that you're also monitoring?

Yes. So we do it in 2 ways. Real-time, like the past hour or the past 4 hours or whatever. These are all the top trends and this is what your competitors covered and their rankings and their visibility in SERPs, right? 100% of all the times these 3 competitors were there and you were not. And we also give it historically over the past 30 days or whatever period. This is your visibility for all the top trends because these are like the majority of the traffic or the top head kind of thing. So I think this is important, tracking the shifts of trends. The Google News Consumer Insight, NCI, Consumer News Insight or News Consumer Insights, is a great tool for free for all publishers. They have 3 different aspects. If you are a paywall kind of a publisher or gated content, this is amazing. You can see how your subscribers for the different funnels and which channels are working for you or not. Parsley and Chartbeat are amazing for real-time. Most of the publishers use either Parsley or Chartbeat. And then Google Search Console. I just wish that they have real-time data. I think they got better. I think sometimes now up to like 8 hours or 4 hours, but I think in the past, 11 years ago, we used to get real-time data. We used to have like as it happens and we used to track it and see like what keywords are driving traffic and so on. So I hope that they can get back to that.

It's great that you mentioned Google Search Console because we are going to switch to a topic that is actually covering the Google Search Console, but again, I wish the there was much more information about it in general, right? Discover. The way of discover and engagement and I will say this sort of like the bridge of what's next in content discovery, the search journey, right? Like you don't necessarily need to be actively searching for something but it will recommend it to you based on your past searches, experiences beyond the risk that this has in itself, right? Like, you know, you only are recommended stuff that you tend to end up believing already and like anyway. But how you're managing the impact of this at this moment in big publications? Because from the data that I have seen, it can be huge. Like publications can get easily at the moment more than 80% of the traffic sometimes from Discover. And this can be, I have to say, very risky, right? Because it's not something that you can predict as much or control as much. Anyway, I wanted your insights or experience with it and any sort of tips that you have found useful to optimise for it and control it in a positive way.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. Like you said, publishers can get huge chunks of traffic from Discover. Some of my clients, 50-60% of search traffic would be Google Discover traffic. And it is probably the biggest unknown at the moment about how it works and how the algorithms work. However, what I have seen with my publishing clients, especially the bigger ones who have suffered at the hands of Google's algorithm updates, especially in the last 2 years, that their visibility in regular Google Search and Top Stories and their visibility in Google Discover tends to be mirror images, exact copies of each other. Which tells me that Google Discover borrows the exact same algorithms as Google Web Search. So when a website is rewarded after a core algorithm update, we also tend to see an equivalent growth in Discover traffic. The same when a website is penalized after a core update, we tend to see a similar drop in Discover traffic. So we know that Google uses the same algorithmic signals in Discover as it does in normal web search, which actually makes it a bit more—

Yeah.

clear about what you need to focus on. It's the same pillars of making sure it's crawlable, indexable, you have the right quality signals, you send the right topic signals to Google and all of that. The only difference is because it's such a personalized feed for every single person, there is no tool out there that will tell you where you rank, what people search for, because there's no searches involved. It's proactive. It's searchless rankings basically. So you have no idea about impressions or user profiles of people. who look at your content, which is why the tool that John also mentioned, the News Consumer Insights one, is so very, very useful because it tells you the type of people that consume your news.

Yeah.

Which is in Analytics and therefore doesn't come from Search Console. It's Analytics data, which of course combines search and discover traffic. So it tells you a lot more about your general audience and what you can then optimize for to make sure you You tick those engagement boxes because as we know, a large part of Google Discover is personalized and optimized based on what people consume, not just the websites that they look at, but also the topics that people like to read a lot about. And you see this with blogs like my own blog. Whenever I publish a new blog post, I get a temporary spike in Google Discover traffic. And that's not because those people always read my blogs. No, they don't because I don't publish often enough. but because they're interested in SEO. And SEO is a topic. My website is associated with that topic. So Google then throws that article in people's feeds that knows that, oh, those people are interested in SEO. This website writes about SEO once in a while. I might as well throw it in there to see what kind of traction it gets and what kind of traffic you get.

I have been studying Discover for the past 2 months heavily. And it was a lot of data in it. So the first thing I would say, when we say 80% Discover traffic in Google Search Console, I think that number sometimes is misleading for users because when you look at your analytics, Google Discover is not considered to be search traffic, right? When you look at Google Search Console, yes, they're comparing your search versus Discover as one big pie and they tell you 80% is coming from Discover. But when you translate this back to the company, if you say 80% of search is Discover, this doesn't align with the analytics. So when we report in the analytics, we say percentage of total traffic because it's in the referral bucket. Now, we have seen that Discover in Europe and Asia is way, way higher than the States, for example, and I would say that's because of the Android consumption in these continents versus in the US where iPhone is very dominant. So Android is a Google play where they can push Discover very heavily to the users So we have seen some places in India, I have seen sites in Google Search Console reporting 90-95% traffic in Discover, which are more vulnerable as you mentioned, because when they lose that traffic, it's devastating, right? When they drop in the traffic. I totally agree with Barry that whenever there is an impact of core updates on Google, we have seen the same impact on Discover. Now, the things that we know on Discover for sure is image resolution and size makes a huge difference, right? You must have high-resolution, big images to be considered for Discover. The second thing we, we know for sure, it's the interest of the topics. So one of the things we do is we analyze, uh, the entities and the topics in the Discover URL. So you don't have queries, the queryless search, as you called it, right? So if you download all the URLs every week and then do some kind of smart analysis on the entities for these articles, and you see the movement of these entities, this is your segment of users who are interested in SEO or whatever, right? And then Google keeps pushing that. So focus on these entities and these topics because this is what Google identified as your very high relevant users. The third thing is there is a high correlation, at least in the US, between Buzz and Discover. So I downloaded like 18 different metrics internally on the site and externally from all different sources of traffic and engagements, and I have seen a huge correlation between Twitter engagement and Discover in US. Now this is not true for other countries because Germany, for example, Twitter is very small, so it's not that correlation. But Buzz, and at least in US, Buzz or Twitter specifically and Discover, there is some kind of a correlation there. So these are the top things. I also seen that the topics that you are strong score in Google News usually work well for you in Discover. So there is some kind of authority play there, but there's so much to discover. Oh, and location. Location is very important, especially for local news. So that works very well.

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned location because in my case, for example, as you know, sometimes I do testing and I change the location on my mobile to do international type of validation with clients and then sometimes I don't even trust what DPMs tell me, whatever. I go and check it myself directly on my mobile. And then speaking about this and the influence on Discover, I start to get a lot of— even if I remove it and I change it back, for a while my Discover, my feed it's like stuck and then I start getting, for example, if I change to the UK for a while, I start getting recommendations for British expats in Spain and I was like, oh, was it because I was searching in English from Spain and I was changing back and forth from the UK to Spain? It's funny the role that it can have for sure.

Location is very dominant in Discover, not only in a country level but Even cities, right? When you move from one location within the same country to another location within the country, we have seen a shift in the Discover feed from one place to another place.

This is great. So to start wrapping up, given the most common issues and challenges that you have found in publication and news type of websites, which you will say are your top tips? Usually not necessarily as well covered and sometimes even misunderstood or overlooked.

Yeah, for me, some of the more common problems I see with news publishers is that they try to do too much, do too many different things. Like a publisher that wants to cover all of technology and therefore covers everything quite shallowly and doesn't produce enough content to really be seen as a sort of an expert voice in tech. This is especially true for new startup websites that have grand ideas. And my recommendation for those would be focus on one thing first and then see about expanding later on. So rather than focusing on all technology, maybe focus on one particular aspect of technology like smartphones. Or even within smartphones, focus on Android phones, for example. And then build up from that basis to see if you can actually grow that site and get that traction and build that editorial expertise as well. And from a technical point of view, news SEO is one of the few areas where having clean code is actually quite important because of the speed of news. And Google tends not to perform those secondary and tertiary indexing levels, like completely rendering a page. That tends not to happen for most news publishers. So you have to have clean HTML source code where the article can be very easily extracted. From the entire code. And I even found that Google has sort of a size limit in the amount of HTML it'll process in that first-pass indexing before it just gives up and says, yeah, this is just gibberish. So you want to keep that code lean and clean, not rely on any client-side JavaScript, and make sure that the article from the opening headline all the way down to the closing paragraph can be very easily extracted. Plus, of course, having the news article structured data implemented as well.

This is great.

On my side, I would say the technical side is the speed and the user experience. I think most publishers are guilty of cramming so much stuff on one page, right? And you still have seen like a bigger, like really big publishers that when you look at their homepage still look or feel like it's a newspaper, right? So there is a We're guilty of that, right? So speed will become more and more important and user experience will become very, very important. On the editorial side, I think there is 2 things. One is the file and lock mentality. We wrote the story, we're done with it, let's move to the next one. I think maybe this is more in the lifestyle stuff, right? The breaking news is like we have to be fast and accurate. We will never sacrifice accuracy. For being fast, but being fast is really important here. And finally, I would say that there's a lot of publishers still believe that they are the makers of the trends. And sometimes that's true, but for one story a year. But most of the time, users are searching for what's trending out there. Most of the time it's driven by TV and what's happening around there. So there should be a good balance between opinion pieces and other stuff.

Yeah, indeed, 100%. And thank you very much for bringing the editorial aspect. Still today, do you find challenging to influence, for example, that journalists follow certain best practices, even if there are more readier type of platforms or CMSs that are able to even suggest Or validate the usage of metadata, for example?

Yeah, it's less and less of an issue if I'm honest because the publishers who haven't been able to adapt have started to lose out. So they've had to adapt because the traffic just hasn't appeared. And for me, it always was a bit of a false argument. I remember having conversations when I first started working in news SEO with journalists who felt that optimizing for search was a pollution of their core But then I would just bounce back at them, right? But you've optimized for print headlines all this time. You've optimized for somebody walking by a newsstand, seeing the printed paper lying there, making sure your front page headline stands out. This is no different. This is just an evolution of that concept. So you need to look at it like that. You're optimizing for someone scrolling down a web page to make sure your headline stands out. And of course, making sure the headline is visible there in the first place. And once you plant that seed, the rest tends to fall into place fairly naturally after that. And the journalists who are inherently resistant against optimizing for SEO, they tend not to last, or they tend to have a buffer between them and the article being published on their website, you know, so that there is at least some one person with an SEO brain who is able to tweak that and optimize it. And I think it's become Almost a non-conversation nowadays. I think nearly everybody involved with online publishing realizes the importance of optimizing for SEO. And the best publishers I work with have several optimization fields built in, right? This is your title for SEO and your image for SEO. This is your title, image, and description for Facebook. This is the one for Twitter, etc., etc., so that they make maximum use of the possibilities of every single platform that that article will be shown on and making sure that it is optimized to tap into the algorithms that are specific for that platform. And those are the ones that tend to be the most successful in the long run.

Thank you very much for all the insights, all what you have shared from all of the years that you have of experience working in SEO for news publications. I really appreciate it. If you want to learn more and know more about this topic, you know where to follow them. You will see their Twitter handles too and websites. Jan, Barry, thank you very much for, for coming today.

Thank you.

If you have also any questions, also doubts, you can also please do that. Leave your questions in the comments below. This is me being a good YouTuber here. Like the video too, subscribe to the channel because more videos like this are coming. Thank you very much for your attention again and have a good day. Bye-bye.

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