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Abstract. Search engine optimization (SEO) can enhance an article's visibility on Google search, increase a news site's search ranking, and drive audience traffic. Journalists are expected to possess SEO as a vital skill, even though each publication might have its unique approach. It is challenging to see what aspects of SEO are interesting for news sites and which aspects of it should be prioritized in content creation. This study explores the potential of SEO algorithms to increase traffic to news sites and analyze the relationship between Google's algorithmic prioritization of content and audience engagement, as well as their impact on audience behavior towards specific content. This research shows how search-engine-optimized content drives significant audience traffic and presents the correlations between optimization solutions, audience traffic metrics, and audience engagement factors in sports news sites from Romania. The study focuses on sports news sites as content-specific sites and employs content optimization factors for Google as analysis criteria. In conclusion, this study indicates that optimizing content for search engines does not always result in significant traffic for sports news sites. The findings indicate that sports news sites prioritize off-page SEO and their profile of links over on-page or technical SEO.
Keywords: Search engine optimization (SEO); SEO for sports news sites; Audience engagement; Audience traffic; Content optimization.
Introduction
This study is developed in the context of lack of scientific literature related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and journalistic practices. Until now, this topic is more approached from the perspective of audience engagement theories, digital media consumption theories, but less in the relation and in accordance to increasing audience traffic and content optimization. The research tries to fill in this gap and to present the situation in the Romanian digital media landscape. The new perspective of this study takes into consideration the media audience theories and the practical aspects of optimizing content for search engines. Also, because we talk about SEO, we consider the algorithms that are involved in this process by the search engines. The present analysis looks at the most important sports news sites in Romania in terms of audience and tries to determine the extent to which these sites optimize their content for the Google search engine. Also, it demonstrates how optimizing news site content for...