About a year ago we started on the journey of focusing on SEO both technically and editorially and have successfully grown our traffic from 7m UU per month to 18.6m, making us more competitive in our market in terms of Global UU traffic. The majority of this work has been carried out by our in house editorial and technical teams working together with a common goal and clear guidelines.

SEO for publishers is both competitive and complicated and we are pleased but not complacent with our current progress. We fully appreciate that this is a very dynamic market place and we constantly strive to improve our SEO so that we can deliver our rich content to a wider audience in both the UK and overseas.

If you want any further information please do not hesitate to contact me.

Cheers

Julian

Julian Sambles
Head of Audience Development
Telegraph Media Group

What I took exception to was the way that SEOs seemed to be labelled by a couple of the journalists as scammers; to be fair, both of those journalists have now commented on my post or elsewhere that this was not their intent.

Cheers,

Ciarán

PS – Your point about the number of pages indexed is of course meaningless unless you know how many pages each site actually has live. What if The Guardian actually has 10 million pages live and The Telegraph 2.6 million – which is the better at SEO then?

That isn’t by accident – Guardian has been embracing SEO for years.

Most people these days are using Google and in some cases the other Search Engines (alright there is a small percentage of people who don’t use Google) to find products, services, advice, information and news but the genuine uptake for SEO in the corporate sector is still slow.

With regards to the educational side I fully agree. Even if the SEO/SEM is outsourced it always works better when the client has some knowledge of what’s required, what’s best practice, timelines and that sort of thing.

I’ve been speaking at and running a number of courses with organisations like E-Consultancy and The Chartered Institute of Marketing and there does seem to be a rapidly growing interest in SEO.

Many sectors now are hugely competitive eg travel, financial services, electronics but many are still wide open.

The larger newspaper brands have a huge advantage in that they can target the ‘long tail’ due to the amount of content they’re creating.

The Daily Telegraph have done a superb job in this. They understand the whole process of the user journey from search through to SERP through to landing pages and then engagement. They understand and are actively working with SEO, know what’s needed and are doing it very, very well. That’s why they’ve moved ahead and all power to them. Very well done is what I say!

To be fair, I think now that I may have been a tad harsh (but only a tad). One of The Guardian journos came & left a comment on my site, whilst another did the same on a post of a similar nature. Both said that they realised that SEO wasn’t about scams, just the bad stuff – so I guess that they should be picked up on not explaining things properly to readers, rather than not understanding SEO.

The other reason I say this is that just a couple of days later they invited Danny Sullivan in to speak at an internal seminar (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/future_of_journalism_chasing_r.html). He hammered home the importance of SEO and it certainly seems like it’s something they may be getting to grips with.

It’s interesting that you say they should hire a good SEO firm as an anonymous commenter on my post claimed to work for the company doing their SEO. Whoever that person is, if they’re telling the truth they still have an education job to do (often part of an agency’s role). The answer is, of course, obvious – they should hire my agency!
;)