Jun 28 2005

Reporters, Columns, and Actionable Items

Hey, you're new. We like you already! You obviously have great taste! If you like what you read here you'll probably want to subscribe to our RSS feed (or the audio RSS feed). Stick around and be sure to speak up and post a comment or two!

Writing an article on SEO is difficult enough, even for those of us immersed in the industry. I often run across mainstream news articles about SEO that are considerably out of date or a story about something new that’s really, well, not.

For someone not in the SEO industry the learning curve is considerable. I realized this truth when I was called by a columnists from the Wall Street Journal’s Startup Journal.

I was initially approached after Sarah Needleman found one of my articles published on Web Pro News. I had multiple conversations with Sarah, helping her put story ideas together (which ultimately changed direction after conversations with her editor) and giving her a crash course on SEO.

The end result is probably not the article I would have written (or expected) and I think that her greenness to the subject of SEO shows. Of course, I might be able to see a lot more of that simply from the conversations between us. All said and done I think the article does a fair job and probably speaks to her audience, though I’m not sure if it leaves the readers with anything actionable. I guess that’s not uncommon for such articles and just something that I tend to look for in things that I read.