NEW YORK As newspapers continue along in 2008, only one major aspect of the industry will surely show true growth this year: online ad revenue. Topping publishers' New Year's resolutions was wringing as much money as possible out of the Web. This, of course, largely hinges on traffic.
There are many ways to goose the numbers, including the addition of video, podcasts, and blogs, not to mention breaking stories and providing intelligent commentary. But publishers are also quietly tweaking content -- under the hood, that is -- to make stories place higher in search-engine results. This strategy entails crafting headlines and ledes in certain ways to ensure that search-engine crawlers lock onto certain words, for better search-engine results. Of course, it's far more complicated than that -- but in the following story, E&P explores how search engine optimization (SEO) gets done, and why.Yet any surge in traffic -- if it's not accounted for correctly and credibly -- could be a wash, and collating that user data is a science all its own. Site-centric and panel-based metrics each have their benefits and drawbacks. Part One: Putting Numbers to Work for You There have been some uncomfortable mumblings of late amid the fanfare surrounding newspaper Web traffic. Since the Newspaper Association of America started keeping tabs on monthly unique users, average time spent per person, and the number of page views -- all increasing in importance as circulation slumps -- the organization has been able to tout some astounding growth rates."More than 59.6 million people visited newspaper Web sites in July 2007, a 9% increase over the same period a year ago and the second-largest monthly audience since NAA began tracking these numbers in 2004," blared a press statement released by the association in late October. Source: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003700015
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