Tips for better SEO

Gil Asakawa, who is in charge of audience development for MediaNews properties, took a brief look at our Web sites today with an eye toward SEO and user engagement. StarNewsOnline came out fairly well.

He looked at the site late Sunday night, when Crossroads was in the featured story spot. He mentioned that the image attached was eye-catching and unusual compared with a typical news site illustration.

This is the image that appeared on the StarNewsOnline home page when Gil critiqued it.

(I noticed it didn’t have any photo credit, which made me wonder which photos it was made from and who made it. But that’s a different issue.)

He also liked that we had so many photos with the headlines in the story list to the left of the featured story. But the one story without art had the bullet that all text-only headlines get, and he was confused because it looked like a quotation mark or something. With only one up there, it seemed to be signifying something when it really just takes up space. Not much we can do, but there you go. Yet another reason to try hard to get art for all stories.

The criticisms were mostly that locations and names needed to be included in more of the headlines and moved closer to the front of the headline when they were there, even in the top teases that go with the “In Case You Missed It” topper. That’s what people search for and what they scan for, so they should be at the start of the line of text.