Handsome Logic

News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch has to make access to WSJ.com free, hoping that the open access will attract more “big spending advertisers”. No doubt, Murdoch has taken note of the success enjoyed by NYTimes.com (The New York Times) since they dropped their subscription-based publishing model in favor of a model similar to what Murdoch proposes for WSJ.com.

I had the opportunity to attend the “In House: Big SEO” session at SES NY 2007, where Marshall Simmonds of Deine Search Strategies told the story of how the NY Times went search engine-friendly. Marshall told the audience that the Times was receiving 22% of their traffic from search, and drive home the following tips for in-house search marketers:

• Make small changes with big results. The changes he specifically highlighted were managing the activity of crawlers, cleaning up code and optimizing title tags and meta descriptions.

• Get your wishlist past the IT department(s). Marshall’s recommendation was for in house SEO folks to try to piggyback their requests on other planned changes (redesigns, relaunches, etc). Beyond that, Marshall recommended preparing a Cost/Benefit analysis of every proposed change that would sell both executives and the IT department.

• Force compliance with SEO best practices by creating or modifying required fields in the site’s content management system.

• Manage expectations. HUGELY important point. Never oversell yourself or what someone can expect from your services.
• Compare your logs to search engine market share data to identify trends, including conversion rates and incoming traffic patterns.

So everybody wins here. We get free access, the Times and WSJ get more traffic and ad revenues. I’d say the real cap feather in this case goes to Marshall and Define.