We welcome Boston.com links, but first we must write better Web headlines

Let me state for the record that if and when Boston.com expands its Your Town initiative beyond the immediate Boston area, and starts aggregating stories from our New England media groups -- Cape Cod, SouthCoast, Seacoast and Nantucket -- I will not consider it a threat and will not join Gatehouse in their suit against the New York Times Co.

(Others in the company might disagree, of course, so let's also state for the record that this point of view is mine, singularly, as we have not yet formed an official company consensus, much less a position, on this issue.)

Sure, I understand the competitive concerns on the advertising and branding front. Long-term, however, the opportunities are going to outweigh the challenges. And make no mistake: Such partnerships are tremendous opportunities. We should be seeking them far and wide, with all sorts of media, professional associations, government institutions, non-profits and more.

It's in exactly the same vein as content distribution and marketing programs we've been discussing, exploring and preparing for over the last 12 months, especially on the back end as we've prepped calendar, headline and business review widgets for placement on both partner Web sites and for everyday users to pick up and put on their blogs or other personalized platforms.

Bob Kempf, old friend, sign us up, and it has nothing to do with your Ottaway heritage. It's a simple PageRank equation.

• Boston.com's Google PageRank = 8
• Cape Cod's Google PageRank = 6
• SouthCoast's Google PageRank = 6
• Seacoast's Google PageRank = 4
• Nantucket's Google PageRank = 5
  

Now, I don't pretend to be the grand poobah of search engine optimization. In fact, our page ranks would indicate we've not paid enough attention to such things across the board for quite some time. It's why one of our major strategic planning items come January will be focused squarely on improving our visibility in the search engines.

That said, one of the basic tenets of SEO is that the more links you have back to your site, the more authorative you appear to be to Google, especially when those links come from a site with a higher PageRank than yours. Such links translate to having a greater chance of being more highly visible in Google -- depending on the keywords used, of course.

So we will take Boston.com's appropriately attributed links to our stories, especially if they continue to leave the "nofollow" attribute off of the link. I will thank them for the direct traffic they drive to us. I will thank them for general opportunity on many other fronts, too.

Meanwhile, we will redouble our efforts to decrease our bounce rate and convert that traffic into more loyal customers once they arrive at our articles. We will ride that wave of links -- in combination with other SEO-related efforts -- all the way to higher visibility in Google and other search engines, which in turn will also generate more traffic and more opportunities for conversion.

But before Boston.com or anyone else blesses us with such great opportunities, we've got some more basic blocking and tackling to do. For starters, Boston.com and any other future partners are not going to rewrite our headlines for us.

The headline is the first and perhaps only chance we have at magnifying the potential of any linking opportunity, and when we continue to leave print kicker headlines in place for Web placement and aggregation, we remain dead in the water in the customer conversion battle. From an SEO point of view, the dearth of keyword-rich headlines also means none of these back links is going to be worth very much in the race for increased search engine visibility.

We need to get in the habit of adding more context and keywords to our Web headlines. To illustrate, here is a sampling from around our empire today:

• Multiple crashes reported on ice-slicked roadways (Where?)
• Amtrak trains delayed by severe weather (Where?)
• Santa sisterhood (What is this story even about?)
• A Christmas stolen now retrieved (Where?)
• Wake held for slain teenager (Where?)
• Shop around the clock (What is this story even about?)
• Police say man pointed gun at woman, then fled (Where?)
• Ice storm shelter closed as power restored (Where?)
• You were good, for goodness’ sake. (What is this story even about?)
• Route I-495 North reopened, South remains closed (Where? 495 is a long road)
• Last-minute shoppers create 'horrendous' traffic (What kinds of shoppers? Where?)
• Community Update (Which community?)
• Roads are slick; freezing rain now will continue to noon (Where?)
• Stolen ferret report leads to two arrests (Where?)
• Universities, union clash on smoking ban (Where?)
• 'A Living, Breathing Celebration' (What is this story even about? Would it surprise you that it is not about Christmas, but instead about state history?)
• 'Empire Builders' series details local history (Where?)
• Charities do surprisingly well (Where?)
• Delivering the knockout (What is this story even about? Boxing?)
• A healthy reputation (What is this story even about?)
• Official says plans greener at stadium (Where?)

When blended like this, the home market for the stories is indistinguishable. In an aggregated content world, the more descriptive the headline, the more likely you will make it for your headline to be understood and attractive to the local audience seeking your content on other platforms.

The flip side, of course, is that using the town name in every headline that makes sense will create some overkill on our community pages. In fact, the redundancy will also be beneficial from a search-engine standpoint, and it will not significantly harm the user experience. If headlines on the Anywhere page all have the "Anywhere" in them, the keyword saturation of that page will help it rank highly for anyone searching for "Anywhere news" or anything else to do with Anywhere.

The alternative, though, is an outright gamble. Leaving off the place name and hoping the ambiguity will inspire the reader to click and consume some portion of the story to get the full context is tantamount to cold calling the entire phone book and hoping to hit your monthly sales number before you run out of time.

Looking beyond our core platforms, we should consider a keyword-rich, fully contextual headlines as a lead qualifiers. It's one thing to get a bunch of traffic from a punchy headline linked from Fark or Drudge, and hope to convert some small percentage of that flood into a second page view and beyond, but we all know our primary goal is to attract local audiences. The more local information that can be stuffed into a headline, the more likely it is that the person clicking is from the local audience, and we have a much greater chance of converting that consumer to engage with our local advertising and other local content.

Which approach -- cold calling from an unqualified list, or prequalifying and prioritizing your leads -- is more efficient, and more likely to lead to revenue? Well-written Web headlines are the equivalent of the latter, and are more likely to lead to audience retention, which in turn increases our online revenue prospects.

Online content and audience development is not merely about page views and unique visitors. It's about increasing our share of the local online audience to a significant enough scale that our advertising solutions will generate enough meaningful results for local business that invest their marketing trust and budgets with us. If we can't capture a bigger piece of the local audience pie, and don't retain users once we've captured them, we can't very well expect to retain advertisers.

It all starts with the headlines.

We've mastered YouTube, so let's tackle Flickr

I visited with Anne Brennan at the Cape Cod Times yesterday, and the conversation turned to placing our content in front of local audiences on other platforms. To follow that up, I shared with Anne some of my ideas about how Flickr could be part of the mix.

So with apologies to Anne, who will receive a second copy of this when the blog post gets redistributed to our online editors listserv, I thought it might be helpful if I shared my thoughts with a wider audience.

Here's what I would do first with Flickr. Have the photo staffs create their own accounts, and upload their favorite photos. I'd aim for daily, but would be happy with weekly intervals for now. Just one photo per interval is all we ask. Then in the caption, in addition to describing the photo, I would put a link to your photos page, something like:

See these and more photos of the week from my colleagues at the <a href="http://www.capecodonline.com/
apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=MEDIA01">Cape Cod Times
</a> and other galleries on <a href="http://capecodonline.com/
apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=MEDIA01">our photos page.</a>

The html code will render, so that the captions will actually link. Here's an example:

http://flickr.com/photos/spolay/2226368564/

I would then make sure to add each photo to the most appropriate Flickr group or groups, where the photos can be targeted to specific interests and gain wider visibility among a more engaged audience. That will translate to a greater potential for click throughs. The photo example linked in the previous paragraph has been added to Cape and Islands Life and Photogamer, an amateur photographer exercise and group I've been participating in.

(Speaking of groups, I found a New Hampshire one that would make a cool project in any one of our markets: http://www.flickr.com/groups/nh/discuss/72157600349063566/)

Down the road, I would try collecting UGC photo efforts on Flickr, asking people to "tag" their photos with "cctstorm" or "cctpatriots" to collect their work in a Flickr slideshow, selections of which you'd republish in the paper and could fairly easily pull back into your site using a Flickr widget (they call it a badge).

Tags, by the way, is a means by which users can categorize their photos with their own folksonomy. The cool thing is it's a way to connect the dots across multiple accounts. I'll walk you through an example:

Start with my tags: http://flickr.com/photos/spolay/tags/

When you click on a tag like "sandwichma" from there, you get a screen that shows all of my photos with that tag: http://flickr.com/photos/spolay/tags/sandwichma/

Then, there is a link to see all public photos tagged the same way: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/sandwichma/. The first couple of pages this morning are actually my photos, because I recently uploaded a large batch from our family's Christmas card outtakes. Starting on about page 3 of this set, though, you can see photos from other users: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/sandwichma/?page=3

Flickr is among the most popular photosharing sites out there, and it's a mystery to me that so few newspapers -- at least to my knowledge -- have tried to avail themselves of such a highly engaged and enthusiastic audience to any great degree. I recently polled some colleagues from around the industry, and the only similar efforts I could unearth are at fresnofamous.com (http://www.flickr.com/groups/fresnofamous/), nh.com (http://media.nh.com/) and delawareonline.com (http://flickr.com/photos/tags/delawareonline/clusters/).

Such an effort will take some time to build awareness and momentum. One thing we've learned this past year is that success from this type of outreach will only come with consistently applied effort. I firmly believe there is a long-term payoff, both from the standpoint of reaching a large concentration of Cape Cod photo enthusiasts from far and wide who prefer the Flickr platform to ours, and the search engine optimization benefits of creating meaningful links back to our site from a visible, credible, high-ranking site.

The other thing we have learned time and again is that such an effort needs an owner. If no one owns the initiative, it will wane quickly, if it gets off the runway at all. This is the ideal opportunity to really expand a photography-based virtual beat, so that either the photo editor, one or several of the photographers, or even one of the image technicians, really owns, cares for and feeds this outreach effort.

(Full disclosure: Mike Conery and I undertook some Flickr experimentation with Discover Nantucket (http://flickr.com/photos/discovernantucket/), but I don't think we did enough, especially given that we never fully implemented photo galleries on discovernantucket.com, something that will likely get addressed down the road as Nantucket takes back ownership of the site. So we had nothing of added value to link to -- not a challenge most of our other sites will face. The bigger weakness, however, is that the Inquirer and Mirror staff was never fully invested and involved in the project. We failed to clearly communicate what we were trying to accomplish, and the staff in turn was uncomfortable with the platform and the content we were pulling from it. Water under the bridge, but valuable lessons were learned all around.)

We're obviously never going to supplant Flickr, and the odds of us being the "Local Flickr" are pretty long. So let's try to be involved and visible among our local audience that is already on Flickr, offering that audience some of our high-quality photography while also receiving some benefit for the investment of our time, interaction and conversation.

"People form tribes with or without us," Seth Godin wrote recently. "The challenge is to work for the tribe and make it something even better."

I've only scratched the surface on how to utilize Flickr to your benefit. Here's some additional reading that will help:

http://www.doshdosh.com/comprehensive-guide-to-using-flickr-for-traffic-building/

http://sensiblemarketing.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/promote-your-company-and-drive-traffic-to-your-website%E2%80%A6with-flickr/

Earth to publishers: Stop trying to exert so much control

The headline alone on this AP story on NJ.com is enough to send me into orbit: News Web sites seek more search control

When, oh when, are publishers going to realize that the more we try to exert control over our content, the more likely we are to lose control.

By the way, losing control over the distribution of our content is not a bad thing, people. The easier we make it for readers to access our content -- regardless of platform -- the more likely it will be that we gain and retain readers via whatever channel our content was acquired.

Roadblocks are exactly that. Pretty hard to grow audience when we throw up a bunch of stop signs and detours.

Meta tag and alias reinforcement

Don't just take my, Yoni's and Ken's word for it: There's ample evidence out there in SEO-blog land regarding the importance of meta tags and aliases and how they contribute to keyword density of your pages and the call-to-action text that shows up in the search engine's themselves.

Witness today's post by Miles Price in Search Engine Journal: 12 Basic On-Site SEO Tactics for Optimized Results.

1. The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines

2. The Title Tag - The MOST important aspect of on-page SEO, just take our word for it...

5. The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d (i.e. http://domain.com/real-estate/real-estate-marketing-ideas.com would fetch a high ranking for a page dedicated to real estate marketing ideas - especially with many highly authoritative, relevant, deep in-bound links)

Little League pages

I happened to be at Seacoast yesterday as they launched their Little League All-Stars landing page, and now notice today that Hudson Valley has done the same. Anyone else got a similar page they want to share?

As Howard Altschiller and I were discussing Twitter, he used that as one mechanism to announce the page launch: http://twitter.com/seacoastonline

(And as a reminder, make sure you're linking to new pages from your Site Maps, so that Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN/AOL can pick them up when you next get crawled. You should enter these new pages into the Google Site Search spreadsheet on Google Docs, so when your user searches on your site for that topic, it gets featured as a Suggested Page at the top of the results. Still confused about the latter? Give me a shout.)

How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute

In our conversation on today's Online Editors' call about content distribution, whether or not to link landing pages from Wikipedia was raised. I'm a firm believer that we should, but there's lots of debate about the efficacy of the practice out there in the search engine circles (if you think journalists like to debate, you should read some search engine blogs...).

As I was putting the finishing touches on the Wikipedia training doc that I am about to distribute and post on the DevCenter, I came across a blog post from yesterday that ties into our conversation quite nicely: How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute

Executive summary: Wikipedia's applies the "nofollow" attribute to links to external Web sites. Google honors that attribute (though they "hope and expect" Wikipedia and others to phase out use of that attribute). Yahoo and Ask do not honor the attirbute, and index the linked content.

As Meatloaf once sang, two out of three ain't bad. Makes adding links to Wikipedia worth the effort in my book.