How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industry

by Manoj Jasra Late last week I caught up with Alex Bennert who is an SEO Strategist at the Wall Street Journal. Alex is scheduled to speak at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in San Jose on the topic of “How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industry” so I decided to get her insight on this topic. Check out conversation below: [Manoj]: What are some of the most significant differences working as an In House SEO vs. an agency. [Alex Bennert]: As an agency SEO you are usually managing several clients at once, each one with very different strategies, resources and goals. As an in house SEO, my energy and my skills are completely devoted to a single client. I still juggle multiple projects and work with various internal departments but ultimately there is a symbiosis between these goals. [Manoj]: Are there unique SEO opportunities available to online publications compared to other sites? [Alex Bennert]: A SERP today displays multiple content types such as news, video, images, stock quotes and blog posts. This opens up a lot of potential real estate on the search page because many online publishers generate all of these kinds of content. Say for a given query, you have a video, a news story and a blog post that are all relevant. You can actually rank in 3 different places on the first page of a search result. Before the advent of universal search, you had to spam to accomplish multiple placements. [Manoj]: How important has SEO and Internet marketing become to your industry now that more people look online rather than physical newspapers. [Alex Bennert]: I’m certain that Internet marketing has become crucial to this industry however as an SEO, I consider myself more of a technologist than a marketer. Search, at its core, is simply a conduit for people looking for specific information. My job is simply to know how search engines access data so that whenever we have information, it can surface on relevant queries. Beyond that, the feedback loop of search data provides us with a lovely little window into the heads of our audience, what they’re thinking about and what words they use to express this in a search box. [Manoj]: I am assuming duplicate content is a major concern for your online publishers? [Alex Bennert]: You have no idea! Duplicate content was one of the first and most challenging problems to address when I came to WSJ

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How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industry

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