AOL Big Secret: Taking SEO very Seriously

It was discovered that AOL plans to completely redo the way they produce content.  This is only two years into their CEO, Tim Armstrong,  tenure at AOL.  He plans to completely amp up their SEO efforts.  Before this writers would just write articles and use the AOL portal as a way to advertise for their articles. With AOL continuing to lose market share this will not continue to be sustainable. There is also a huge opportunities for companies who intentionally and optimize their articles for SEO.  Tim Armstrong said that they would be amping up their production of content as well as training all of their staff how to effectively optimize article and think with an SEO mindset.

Changes for AOL Editorial Department

Tim said that there are going to be big changes in AOL’s editorial department.  Some of the changes that are planning on happening are as follows:

• produce more stores per month from 33,000 to 55,000
• pageviews per story are to increase from 1,500 to 7,000
• video stories to go from being 4% of all stories produced to 70%

His goal with appropriate training is that 95% of the articles written for AOL will be optimized for Search Engines.  The are calling this new push of optimized content “The AOL Way.” This movement is being met with great resistance from the employees at AOL.  They are complaining because of how sudden it is and they feel it steals their creativity.  A multi-million dollar company is trying to blitzkrieg  SEO, only time will tell how effective it is.

SEO is the Way of the Future

Although a not so dramatic approach might be more effective, AOL is right.  SEO is extremely important and is the way of the future.  As search engines like Google get better and better people are just searching for news on Google not CNN or Fox news.  News distributors need to write first for the people, but definitely keep Search Engines in mind.  AOL announced that it editors need to look for content that could be developed to fill wholes in the market.  I think this is a great idea because its authors will then be writing about ideas that people care about can’t find.  This is a great service to the world had shows how being savvy at search engine optimization can actually make your more efficient and discover opportunities in the market. If AOL had cared about SEO in the beginning maybe they wouldn’t have fallen so far behind their competition.