SEO NEWS IN TERMS OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM: A STUDY OF SEO NEWS
Project no. 20353 · Status: Kapanmış · 2018
Summary
According to data dated December 2019, Google is the web platform where most entries are made in the world and Turkey. The vast majority of web traffic flows through Google and this has made searches on this platform important for digital newspapers. The opportunity of measuring the issues of public interest through Google has been provided and this has resulted in Google-oriented journalism. Today, in the vast majority of digital newspapers in Turkey, there are SEO editors whose task is to make news top and be clicked more in Google and optimize them for Google. The fact that the SEO has become so important in journalism has made it necessary to investigate how SEO news changes journalism. Therefore, in this project, 185 SEO news in the digital newspaper with Turkey's highest percentage of visitors (Hürriyet, Milliyet, Sabah, Yeni Şafak, Sözcü, Star, Akşam, Posta, Haberturk and Vatan) was examined with content analysis method and analysed in Nvivo 12 Pro software. The research has aimed to reveal how many the words searched most in Google Trends are reported in newspapers, how SEO has changed the news, and whether SEO news includes news value factors. According to the results of the project; SEO in journalism has changed journalism in terms of content and form. Since 95% of the news reviewed were reported to be a trend on Google, and 5 % of them were made news because they had news value criteria. SEO has created new categories of news that differ from traditional journalism; Routine SEO content news such as evergreen content, media / series news, important news, gold / currency prices are examples for these. In the news, there were changes such as headline in form of interrogative sentence (60%), usage of hashtag and inclusion of hashtags in headline (47%) that are not seen in traditional journalism. In the news reviewed, unethical practices such as click bait, hooked headline and mysterious headline that are often seen in internet journalism have been found rare. In 66 % of the reviewed news, it was seen that interrogative sentence was used in news text and it was aimed to make Google say "this content overlaps with the subject searched". According to the results of the research; the use of question sentences in the headline, the use of question sentences in the introduction of news, parallel labeling with Google trends, using longtail keywords are the most common features in SEO news. Keywords: SEO, Digital Journalism, news worth, Search Engine Optimization.