Yesterday, in typical media corporation fashion, Daily Mirror editor Matt Kelly stumbled into the Internet awareness party impressively late; presumably from the SEO POW camp where he had been held captive since the late 90’s (nice mugshot Matt!). While delivering his keynote speech at the World Newspaper Congress Matt Kelly used the platform to call out search engine optimisation practices and blame the current state of journalism on pandering to search engines. Thankfully for journalistic integrity around the world Matt will now be taking journalism back to the highbrow, intellectual peaks that the Daily Mirror is renowned for.
While Matt doesn’t say anything I would disagree with (generally speaking the points he makes are all valid) I have to question what rock he has been hiding under for the last few years. The main crux of Matt’s tirade centres on his claim that SEO changed the way he had to write news: “Content wasn't king. Traffic was. Whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn't matter as long as the audience grew.” Now, I’m not sure where Matt got this “SEO” advice from but it seems to contradict virtually every piece of search engine optimisation advice I’ve heard in recent years. All Matt had to do was quickly type “Content IS King” into Google and peruse the floods of blog posts, articles and opinion pieces written by persons in the SEO industry declaring exactly why excellent content is hands down the most important thing a website can do to bring in and, crucially, retain visitors. Hell, one of the top few results in Google declares “Content is King” as the “Golden Rule of SEO”.
I actually found Matt’s rant (which can be read in full on the guardian website) to be an interesting read; the case studies on his websites offer some interesting facts and figures which back up exactly why content is hugely important in an environment where people are presented with billions of pages containing potentially desirable information. The main issue I have is that his rant is centred on attacking the SEO industry while actually recommending exactly the same approach that all reputable SEO companies would suggest: content is, and always has been, king.
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