Today I returned to WINOL to see the students put together their weekly news bulletin as well as speak to them about SEO.

A fantastic effort by all, the quality of the news and production values have come a very long way since I was at WINOL!

Below is a document that outlines the main points we discussed today after the bulletin (you can download a PDF document of this using the link at the bottom of the page).

My main takeaways from today and the things I would love to see on WINOL next time I come back are:

• Use separate page titles and headlines – one rational (for the search engines) and one for the users.
• Write meta descriptions – short synopsis of story that is designed to be displayed in the search engine results.
• Use image ALT tags – this is the best way for search engines to understand what your photojournalism is all about!
• All reporters should start building up their online profiles using Google+ and linking this up with the content that is produced on WINOL – see this link for more info on making this work effectively – https://plus.google.com/authorship
• Work on getting the site indexed in Google News by following the guidelines in my document and then submitting a ‘news sitemap’ to Google.
• Use website crawlers to check the website for errors (broken links etc) and fix as much as possible to maintain a level of quality on the site.

All information can be found here:

Download: Online Marketing for News Websites.

It was great chatting to you all today and if you have any questions about SEO and online marketing send me a tweet!