Priorities: Content or SEO?

After numerous (attempted) site redesigns—both front-end and back- —as well as “SEO expert” consultations, usability studies, site-map tweaks and resubmissions, meta data nuances, web 2.0 discussions, Twitter seminars, Lexis Nexis brown bag luncheons, e-mail marketing campaigns, and even a visit from a representative from Google, I have had a first row seat to much of my organization’s tenuous attempts at monetizing the internet. Bare with me, this observation isn’t a slight to my organization. Instead, it’s a first-hand account of journalism’s rapid shift towards everything New Media.

With declining ad revenue in print products, news organizations and media groups are looking to New Media for salvation and only now realize that the decades-old business models applied to print products may not work in the digital arena. And not to belabor the point, but the news industry is in dire straits. (Save the cable news companies, apparently.) What was called a “transformation” in as early as 2006—a word that alludes to a controlled changes—is “journalism in crisis” in 2009.

News organizations and media groups are beginning to take the web seriously, approaching New Media with renewed purpose and energy. But despite the industry’s transformation and this new found vigor to right the listing vessel that is journalism, when it comes to the industry’s goals with New Media, the end game is the same: generate page-views.

The difficult question is how to do so. For example, should a site have a less-than-stellar month traffic-wise, the inevitable finger pointing is often divided between the content providers, who may fault the website’s lack of reach (read: SEO); and the web developers, who fault the content.

Good content or good search engine optimization, which is the best vehicle to drive traffic to a website? One dilemma from the print world is spilling to New Media: who are you writing for? Should the editorial staff concentrate on writing for the consumer, with the hope that potential advertisers will see a market? Or should they write for the (potential) advertisers, and hope that consumers will embrace their product?

If a site produces great content and attracts a readership, search engines may increase that site’s page rank. Likewise, if a site has excellent SEO, it may expose itself to a larger audience. There is a post hoc ergo propter hoc issue with this mindset.  (Correlation cannot prove causation: just because B comes after A, does not mean A caused B.) To develop SEO—and Google’s PageRank—web producers need to venture out into the web and develop an audience organically. And as I wrote earlier, getting the readers to your content is an admirable goal, but keeping them their should be every producers’ end game. And defining your audience lies at the heart of this.

So, I maintain that if you write compelling content, someone will find eventually find it, and they will link to it.