Dear Mr. Bravo:

As a Master’s student in Media Studies at Stanford, I have been studying web optimization strategies for online news sites such as yours. I’m writing to you today to recommend a few alterations to Palo Alto Online based on what I have learned. The practices I will suggest have increased search traffic and page views for a number of news sites, leading to more exposure, greater reader involvement, and more lucrative relationships with advertisers.

Palo Alto Online could be better optimized for search with some specific, relatively simple changes. First, consider including the full headline of the article in the URL of its page. For instance, the recent article titled, “Silicon Valley economy rebuilding, report says” has a URL ending in “show_story.php?id=24238.” Changing this URL ending to something like “silicon-valley-economy-rebuilding” instead would allow search engines to more easily identify the page as offering information on this specific topic. Consequently, this change would increase the probability of the article surfacing high on a search results page as a news authority on the issue. Second, it would likely be helpful to include tags on the article page. Tags, which associate the page with a handful of relevant keywords pertaining to the article, increase the likelihood of the page being retrieved by a search engine query. Within moderation, having more tags is more advantageous than having fewer; a greater number of tags will cover a wider range of phrases typed into search fields by potential viewers. Finally, search engines like Google favor “freshness” of information, tending to place the most recently-posted and updated articles at the top of their results pages. Looking at the articles featured “above the scroll” on the home page, I noticed that the most recent update to the prominent “Local Headline News” section took place yesterday afternoon. It would be helpful to continue making changes and adding to articles after their initial online publishing time, whenever possible. This will keep your articles at the forefront of the news dialog as facilitated by search engines. These alterations are quick, simple, and concrete ways to boost site visibility by improving search engine optimization.

In terms of significantly raising page views and increasing the amount of time users spend on your news site, I have a couple more suggestions. First, you may benefit from offering photo galleries in addition to your textual content. Photo galleries appeal to many viewers, especially online, and additionally increase page views and time spent on the site. Galleries set up in a slideshow format can significantly raise page views associated with your site if formatted in such a way that each new photo unobtrusively forwards the user to a new page/URL. Consider finding ways to work galleries into news stories, when possible, or even seeking out stories that will be represented principally as photo galleries, in a photojournalistic manner. Second, I would recommend trying to keep readers on the site longer by embedding links to other, similar articles they may want to peruse after they finish reading a given page. Visible links to other pages, especially if a related thumbnail is included, will potentially prompt readers to engage more deeply with the site over a longer period of time. The increased number of page views, as well as the significant lift in time spent on the site, will strengthen your clout with advertisers. The time invested in making these types of adjustments could result in substantial economic returns.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful and that you consider implementing and sharing them with the rest of your journalistic team. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or would like to engage in a more extensive dialog.

Sincerely,
Alexis Arnold
amarnold@stanford.edu