Ten years ago, search engine optimization was simple: Just cram as many keywords on your pages as you can, then watch your site rocket to the top of the search engine result pages for those words. The result often left Web readers looking at bloated pages with hundreds of repetitions of selected words and phrases, in tiny type, colored to match the background of the page.

In the late 1990s, Google changed that equation by giving greater weight to the number of inbound links to a page. The more other websites linked to your page using a keyword, the higher you ranked in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for that word. That, in turn, led to the “Google bomb,” as thousands of mischievous readers linked targeted sites to selected phrases, such as in the classic “miserable failure” attack.

Today, search engine optimization (SEO) specialists employ a complicated heuristic, balancing keyword density, page titles, URL topology and a judicious solicitation of inbound links in order to move their clients to the top of the SERPs. Use too heavy a hand with any one of these approaches, and your site might be penalized, banishing it from the top spots. Strategize too little, however, and you’ll find your site irrelevant for Web surfers who use Google and Yahoo, instead of bookmarks and URL bars, as their online navigation method.

Why play this game? Because a position at the top of the SERPs can deliver thousands of daily readers — and customers — without the expense of traditional marketing campaigns. SEO success is the most economically viable way to build a lucrative readership — especially for start-up news publications, bloggers and other self-publishing Web journalists.

Over the past three years, SEO has become important not just in bringing readers to a site, but also in making money from them once the get there. Savvy publishers are learning how to employ SEO techniques on pages serving advertisements from automated pay-per-click (PPC) advertising networks, such as Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s Publishers Network, in order to maximize the number of potentially high-paying ads served to their site’s readers.

Missing the boat

Despite these new search-related strategies, most news websites haven’t changed structurally over the past decade. And that, in my opinion, is costing online news publishers significantly, both in terms of lost readers and lost revenue.

Online newspapers tend to do well in attracting inbound links. But where do these links go? Online newspapers generally continue to follow a print-designed publishing model, shoveling piles of individual new “takes” onto the Web each day, never to be updated or cross-linked to future articles on the same story. Inbound links don’t do a newspaper much good if they take readers to an outdated story, with no clear way to guide users to the publication’s most up-to-the-date content on that topic.

Here’s one example: a Google search for “Iraq war.” A CNN package ranks third in the Google SERPs, an impressive showing and the highest for a mainstream journalism organization on that term. But the linked URL goes to a page that, in CNN’s words, “was archived in May 2003 when President Bush declared an end to major combat.”

What good is that to a reader in 2006? This CNN page isn’t news … it’s history. How many readers click back to the Google results when they find CNN’s outdated page? And how many of them would CNN have been able to retain if the linked URL contained the network’s most up-to-date coverage from Iraq?

It’s true that many users looking for news stories turn to Google News — which directs readers to current content — rather than Google’s main search engine. But why limit your market just to those readers who are explicitly looking for news? News publications contain a wealth of information useful to people searching for answers online. Yet your publication’s coverage of Event or Issue “X” will remain invisible to these readers if the search engines are pointing to your past, now outdated URLs covering that topic.

Good SEO would dictate that your most recent coverage of a particular topic should always reside at the same URL — and that URL, as well as its page title, should include the name of the topic. Fortunately for curious news editors, there is a website that provides a model for publishing its news information this way — Wikipedia.

A new(s) strategy

Almost all of the discussion about Wikipedia focuses on its status as a reader-written publication. But Wikipedia’s URL topology should also attract journalists’ attention. By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia’s latest information on the storm and recovery efforts (or lack thereof). They don’t get a months-old dispatch with no clear link to the latest news.

What if a news organization, employing professional journalists, wrote their news website like a wiki? I’m not taking about turning over the page to readers. I’m suggesting that — instead of distinct daily takes — news stories could be covered with encyclopedia-style articles that staffers would update with new information whenever available. How many more inbound links would such an approach get? How much higher in SERPs might this page place than a traditional story archive page? And, most important, how much more accessible would a new or infrequent reader find this approach — as opposed to the traditional list of links to daily news stories?

To be honest, I don’t know. But online journalists are experimenting with multimedia story shells, blogging and other forms of storytelling in an effort to reach more readers online. Why not try a wiki/encyclopedia entry approach, too? (Of course, if editors are going to sell this idea to their bosses, we probably will need a term to describe a staff-written, as opposed to reader-written, article presented in wiki style. “Stiki,” anyone?)

Bloggers also could benefit from a more SEO-friendly approach. I’ve heard from too many bloggers the same complaint that their blogs just aren’t generating much income from their PPC ads, despite relatively large readership. I’m reminded of a corruption of a golfing cliche, which I’ve heard at more than one industry conference: “Blog for show; wiki for dough.”

The search engine spiders that match ads to webpages for PPC programs love the narrow topical focus of wiki pages. But spiders aren’t too fond of chronology-based blog pages. People search the Web by topic, not date. And PPC advertisers bid on keywords, not key dates. So a blog archive should be organized by topic, rather than chronology, to be optimized for search engines and their PPC spiders. Also, I suspect, a blog that provides the sum of its knowledge on a particular topic in a user-friendly single article, like a wiki, would attract and retain more readers and advertisers than would the typical blog’s long list of disjointed individual takes.

Of course, there is a drawback to the wiki/encyclopedia approach. This way of writing does not well serve the loyal, frequent readers, who come to a news site looking for the latest incremental information on a topic. Why make those readers wade through paragraphs of familiar background, looking for the new stuff?

This is where a hybrid of blogging and a wiki could prove killer. Set up your front page as a blog, providing an entry point for frequent readers to learn what is new on the site. Then maintain the archive as a collection of wiki-style summaries, recapping “the story to date” on those topics. Maintain a chronological archive, if you must, but meta-tag it as “no index” to spiders, as not to dilute their attention to your wiki-style archive pages.

Two months ago, I abandoned the traditional model of columns and news articles on one of my highly trafficked personal sites in favor this new model — a front page blog pointing to a collection of topical wikis. In that time I’ve seen a 20 percent increase in search-engine referred traffic, as well as an increase in overall page traffic and earnings per thousand impressions on PPC ads. And this comes during a time that is traditionally the slowest of the year for interest in this site’s topic.

Now I am trying to envision how OJR could be changed to this model as well. Will it happen? Again, I don’t know yet. But thousands of non-journalist Web publishers are working on ways to move their sites to the top of results pages, to gain readers from the millions who use search engines to navigate the Web and to cash in on an increasing percentage of the billions of dollars spent on automated advertising programs. Journalists need to be looking at new ways to organize our online work to do the same, if we are to maintain a profitable profession on the Web.