What's it all about?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO sounds fancy - and for once, for a technical term, it is. It allows those entering information onto the internet to have this information sourced and found easily by others. Huge search engines like Google will pick up on articles, data, videos, or other material if keywords have been tagged along with this information. This naturally leads quite well into journalism; a journalist’s job, is fundamentally to educate and inform. So with the increasing number of media being put online, it’s vital that journalists know how to attract people to their material.

Take Flickr, for example. I needed to use this tool yesterday to find a picture and searched several different keywords to find what I was looking for – the result? Most of it had nothing to do with what I was actually looking for. The tags had all been attached by users of the site, and from what I found pretty much included any tag to any random image, just to have their picture flash up to anyone and everyone. This isn’t particularly useful. It’s vital therefore that journalists and people putting information on the internet use the right ways to attract attention to it. There’s no doubt that the internet provides a sea of information, but if anyone is allowed to access and change this, then it’s impossible to swim seamlessly through the information.

But for huge media organisations, such as the BBC, it’s a necessity to flag up articles in the right way in order to attract traffic to the website. So, if the Pope died and someone wanted to Google this, then keywords such as “pope” and “death” would need to be included, it seems fairly simple. But getting it right is crucial in pulling more people into your website and allowing the user to navigate around it.

All this, is of course, tied up with the previous lectures on network journalism – tools like SEO need to come together to make online journalism work.