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I’ve been studying search engine optimization for about five months now. I’ve bought books. I’ve subscribed to Sphinn. I read a ton of SEO blogs. And I think I am getting pretty decent at it.

I started learning SEO because I want the stories I package and promote to rank better in search engines. I want people to find what I produce!

Shouldn’t everyone in online news want higher rankings? My guess is that many online news producers, print editors, copywriters and news industry blog writers know very little about optimizing their content for search engines, and few care to spend time learning it.

Why care about search engines?

Learn SEO because you could gain more unique visitors to your content.

Think about how people use the Internet. Many of them have a search engine as their homepage. Also, many web users often type in the URL of a site in the search box on their browser instead of the address bar. Have you done that? I know I have.

Search is a becoming nearly the only way to navigate the web. According to ComScore, web users performed 61 billion searches in August 2007.

People find content by using search engines. If online sites’ pages, articles and headlines aren’t optimized for the search engines, how can people find those breaking headlines and interesting stories?

We have high traffic numbers, so who cares!

High traffic is great, and it’s wonderful if a site has a user base to give clicks and ad impressions. But don’t online news sites’ want more users?

If a site doesn’t rank high in search engines, bringing in new users will be an uphill battle.

For example, the Detroit newspapers should rank very highly for the Detroit Tigers. Using Google, I found a Bloomberg story ranking number one, followed by the Tigers’ official site. For web search results only, the Detroit News came in at number 7, directly above a Detroit Tigers fan blog. Not bad. The Detroit Free Press trailed in on the third page of Google search results. LAME!

As a Tigers fan, wanting the local news stories, where are you going to find them? Unless you know to check the Detroit papers, you’ll most likely search find wire copy first. I’m sure the papers wouldn’t care for that.

For another example, check out how one fan site creator put the heat on CBS for the way the network’s ‘Survivor: China’ show appears in Google. This blog post talks about how the CBS page is so poorly optimized that it fails to have a description tag to tell web searchers what the page is about. If the big boys at CBS aren’t up to speed on SEO, imagine the place where most online journalists are at.

What can you do?

Here’s a quick list:

1. Buy Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
2. Subscribe to Sphinn
3. Read blogs
4. Invest time!

Have you started learning SEO? Where do you think it fits in with online news?