Interview with New York Times SEO expert Marshall Simmonds

I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry whenever I read one of Jeff Jarvis’ posts about one newspaper or another complaining about their content showing up in search engines. It happens on a pretty regular basis, and all of the papers complaining about search share one thing: they don’t get it.

The fact of the matter is that search is how people navigate the internet, and the number of people using search to get where they’re going on the web is only going to grow.

If a paper came up to me tomorrow and said “we’re not going to have a home page. We’re going to exist as a bunch of articles you can get to by searching,” I’d say they might be on to something.

In any event, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that all papers should definitely be paying attention to. I had a chance to ask Marshall Simmonds, who is the Chief Search Strategist for the New York Times, a few technical questions about SEO for newspapers.

As you’d expect, the answers are a little bit technical too. But this might be a good one to forward to your team of developers.

Jason: Are there different rules for placing highly in Google News and 
regular Google Search?

Marshall: No. There are different technical hurdles to jump over specifically in the XML feed and META data. We don’t customize our SEO strategy for particular engine or service. If we tried to across an organization the size of the NYT it would fail miserably. 

Instead we have a distilled strategy, based on solid best practices as recommended by the engines, coupled with our internal knowledge of our readers and topics.

Jason: Does newspaper SEO happen more on an architecture level or on a headlines/keyword level?

Marshall: Both.  We break out strategy into two buckets, editorial and technical.  Both are so intertwined that one can’t work without the other. That is to say without a CMS which allows editing of critical fields editors and producers can’t apply knowledge of their audience.

Conversely without well-written, researched, headlines that reach to both endemic and search users our content is effectively invisible.

Jason: Are SEO efforts for papers significantly different than SEO strategies for other businesses?

Marshall: Absolutely. In addition to our in-house work at the NYT we consult with outside companies on strategic search initiatives and execution. When working on an e-commerce campaign our approach is much different and centers around automation and front loaded oversight on architecture strategy and keyword targeting. Of course tweaks are always necessary as market analysis shows the herd has moved on to new or different phrases for a product line. 

For publishers it’s a highly interactive and time-intensive process one requiring significant insight into a target audience where, due to a 24-hour news cycle, historical keyword data may not be available. This puts considerable responsibility on the editorial and production staffs to understand and execute based on audience behavior and SEO fundamentals.

Jason: If newspapers do nothing else, what is the one SEO strategy they should use?

Marshall: Education and empowerment.  Lots of trainings and dissemination of information and not just from the search guys. I come from a family of school teachers who’ve taught me the importance of learning (and teaching) from multiple sources.

Specifically, I can teach SEO to a group of IT professionals but with certain topics someone from IT can convey the same message much clearer using the given vernacular.  To that end we work to build disciples of the SEO strategy across the entire network to leverage internal expertise depending on the audience.

Decentralization of the search engine optimization strategy has been an effective approach for us at the New York Times and our consulting clients as we can’t be the go-to resource for every search related question. 

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