"Put SEO in its Place" - well worth reading

Matt Kelly:

Mirror's associate editor urged the news business to rely less on search engines and more on its journalism, in a World Newspaper Congress keynote in Hyderabad, India.

Matt Kelly, who first began his public crusade this summer on paidContent:UK, said: "In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation" (SEO).

"... The game is up. The days of leading the newspaper industry by the hand, down the path of mythic riches, are coming to a rapid close."

Kelly is on-message with Trinity Mirror CEO Sly Bailey, who has both advocated building loyal audiences before paywalls and is a noted Google critic. "Unique users don't pay wages," she has said.

Bailey and Kelly are two parts in an emerging industry effort to regain the initiative from search engines, the web or generally the media transformation that newspapers have endured. Kelly, in Hyderabad, said of the Mirror's latest sites that "traffic from search engines is ridiculously low ... the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source".

He said knocking SEO consultants down a peg or two to "build sites that perform well for humans, not search engines" is one change necessary to "reverse the damage we've done to ourselves in the last fifteen years of the internet".