Is SEO journalism an oxymoron?

A great article from cyberjournalist.net about the relationship between SEO managers and journalists brings up a lot of good points about finding a happy medium between writing for search engines and for your site's loyal readers. Having worked on the print side for a number of years for a group of web-challenged weeklies, and while currently working for a company trying to refocus to a "web-first" business model, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of this dilemma.

Part of my current job as an online content strategist involves training editors on the importance of search-engine optimization (SEO) techniques and writing for the Web strategies. One of the most frequent questions I get is, "Why should I change the way I write in order to attract readers who may only visit our site once and never come back?"

These are readers that one of my co-workers accurately refers to as "search-engine tourists," and while they are very important, editors often don't understand why. This is probably because editors either don't have access to or don't care about online analytics data. If they cared or had that access, they would see that anywhere from 50-70 percent of their site's total traffic comes from these search-engine tourists, who usually view one or two pages and are gone forever.

I've never worked in advertising, so I admittedly don't know all the in's and out's of online advertising, but most current models center around selling ad impressions, meaning every time an ad is loaded on a page, it counts as one ad impression. When trying to meet the number of ad impressions promised to a client, those search-engine tourists that make up more than half of your site's traffic obviously become just as important as your loyal readers that visit the site every day.

That's the short answer, anyway, when I try to explain to editors why they should care about SEO, as well as why they should be including inbound links in their articles and breaking longer stories into multiple pages. We're trying to squeeze out as many page views (and ad impressions) per visit as possible to increase revenue.

As for changing writing habits and style to influence search-engine rankings, that's a much more difficult adjustment for writers to get used to. After all, with the exception of the inverted pyramid, which is a good SEO starting point, we were never taught any writing techniques that might influence an article's search-engine ranking.

Therefore, it's easy to see why a journalist might think using targeted keywords multiple times throughout an article is repetitive and why doing so "handcuffs" the reporter's writing style. But I also believe most strong writers possess the creative skills necessary to use keywords seamlessly throughout an article without a reader realizing that's what you're doing and without hurting the quality of writing.

Reporters can still be creative and find different ways to tell stories even while they're focusing on using SEO techniques throughout an article. Like any other writing style, it just takes practice.