Kelly sets the stage for disaster in the opening of his keynote speech:

“If we still hadn’t get [sic] the message, there were separate seminars, two a day, laid on free of charge by Google, complete with glossy brochures, on how to do well in Google News. The seminars were full. We all wanted to know the secret. The brochure made it seem so easy…Of course, as we’re all aware now, it was too easy. In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation.“

Mistake #1: Don’t Plan Ahead For The Obvious

As Mr. Kelly and a whole plethora of other newspaper executives sat in on the SEO seminars, eager to learn about how to propel their content around the web, they failed to think about the effects it would have on the future of their industry. If every major news organization begins aggressively optimizing their content to be found by the search engines and all of that content becomes readily accessible, is it not obvious that the value of your work is going to decrease drastically?

“As any first-year economics student will tell you, massively oversupplying a finite market generally leads to a collapse in value. Great swathes of newspaper website inventory – sometimes as much as 90 percent of page views – went unsold.”

Yet, Mr. Kelly, it seems everyone in your industry failed to recognize this before it was too late.

Mistake #2: Destroy Your Brand Values and Standards

As executives learned of the magic of SEO and went back to their organizations saying, “We need to focus primarily on SEO, that’s where all the traffic is!”, they were consciously admitting that the quality of their content and their brand was no longer of importance. Optimizing every article, every link, every word and picture in hopes of being ranked highly was now the priority – not creating unique, engaging content. With the decline in content quality also comes the decline in not only brand values, but brand perception. By pumping out more, lower quality content the newspapers were doing nothing but destroying the loyalty and rapport they had established with their readers. As all of the organizations nose dived into the pool of mediocrity and rampantly copied content, they lost all hope of maintaining a loyal, engaged audience.

“But it gets worse. Much worse, in fact, for our long-term future. In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users…”

And you’re surprised…why? Do you think Apple has such a relentlessly loyal fan base because they consistently create terrible products? Do you think National Geographic has been around for over 100 years because it produces mediocre content? Of course not.

Mistake #3: Focus On Extracting Revenue From New “Users”

Any business text book will tell you that the easiest and most efficient way for a company to make more money is to find more ways to benefit from its already loyal, paying customer base. Unfortunately, the newspaper organizations took the exact opposite approach.

“We’d never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, “users” is about right. They find our content in a search engine, they devour it, then they move back to Google, or wherever, and go looking for more. Often, they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.”

After having collectively spent millions of dollars to drive traffic to their websites, suddenly Mr. Kelly and his industry colleagues realized that no one was buying from them and most “users” could really care less about where they got their content – it was all mediocre, anyway. You don’t make money by selling to “users”, you make money by selling to “customers”.

A few good recent examples of this is TechCrunch creating the, “CrunchPad” (now called the JooJoo) and Smashing Magazine writing, “The Smashing Book”. Both of these sites have hugely loyal audiences and they will devour a product that these sites put out. However, neither of these sites would exist if they said, “Hey let’s make a bunch of crappy content and drive a ton of new users to it!” – Surely we aren’t the only ones who realizes how asinine this sounds.

Mistake #4: Make SEO An Objective, Not A Tool.

Hopefully by now you’ve clearly realized that SEO should never have been the primary objective of the news organizations. High quality content is always of the utmost importance. Yes, it is also extremely pertinent to make sure that your wonderful content is found by a great deal of people, but the goal is to turn “users” into “customers” by creating a level of quality content that they cannot find elsewhere. Unfortunately, if that content is not marketed appropriately and effectively, your great content cannot be found by those willing to pay for it.

Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz recently wrote an article on this notion and has a great point:

“Like many parts of life – it’s not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully. As SEOs, our responsibility is to help the best of the best become the most noticed, most beloved and most linked-to in their field.”

Great content and SEO go hand in hand, but content is always the primary focus so that your SEO efforts can be fruitful.

Mistake #5: Blame SEO For Your Mistakes

As much SEO bashing as Matt Kelly does in his article, he comes to an interesting conclusion:

“It means not letting SEO wag the dog, but instead focusing on creating the most engaging, entertaining, informative content possible. It means building sites that perform well for humans, not search engines. It means we have to stop thinking about users, but start thinking of readers, listeners, viewers. One day, even customers.”

After all the slander and finger pointing, it is good that Mr. Kelly finally admits that they were doing it right in the first place and just ended up making a very expensive, 15 year long blunder.

For those of you who are not exactly sure what all this means, Mashable’s article demonstrates some of the noticeable changes between the soon-to-be-new and the current Google search that we have recapped below:

• Google Caffeine is VERY fast – Being able to return 360,000,000 results in 0.12 seconds is a mind-blowing number that shows online search is more powerful than ever.
• Current content is more relevant content – Both Bing and Google alike are rewarding content for not only being relevant to the user’s search, but up to date. The explosion of social media has allowed for breaking news to travel like wildfire across the internet and search engines are recognizing its importance.
• Google isn’t the only option anymore – While Yahoo! is on a steady decline, Bing has come to be a serious (as serious as 10% search-share can be) competitor for Google. Competition leads to innovation and innovation in the search engine market means faster, more relevant results and that is wonderful news for everyone involved.

In coming months it will be exciting to see how Bing and Google compete with one another as they fight to grow their share of the search market. For users, the central theme remains that to be the highest ranked result, you need to have the highest quality, most relevant content on your website.

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

News Corporation has planned for some time to move all of its news websites to a “paywall” model where users must pay a subscriber fee in order to see the full version of an article. The paywall model has already been implemented in newspaper websites such as The Wall Street Journal, but is being bypassed by users that arrive at the article via search engines. According to Google, approximately 100,000 visitors per minute (a rather astounding number) arrive at the various news organization websites via search engines and if Mr. Murdoch’s wishes are granted, his sites will lose the majority of that traffic.

Murdoch suggests removing News Corp sites from Google

Google, naturally, could care less whether or not the content of News Corp’s sites are blocked considering it is a standard practice for “millions of webmasters“.

“If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us…”

While an online pay-to-view model may be a potential alternative to the declining print media sales, removing those articles’ visibility from search and chopping off billions of visitors per month seems like a rather bold move to solve the “piracy” issue. Given the resources of News Corporation, one would assume that there is a better alternative to maintain the flow of traffic from the search engines while keeping their content exclusive to paying subscribers.

The issue at its core seems akin to that of the digital media industry’s struggling effort to fight against piracy. Even if websites like The Wall Street Journal manage to seclude its content to only paying users, all it takes is one person to post that content on a blog or competing news site for the value of the subscription to be nullified.