So, if you are a news publisher, new or old, how do you engage this new world? I’ve checked around and there are precious few metrics to yet point to; it’s all so new. Consider, though, that “social media optimization,” a term that has buzzed quietly about Silicon Valley for a couple of years, will soon get real, becoming as much a fixture of our digital strategy as search engine optimization has become.

Within that social media optimization, we’ll see focused attempts to understand the value of social links, and, of course, the nuances among social links.

CNET and Gizmodo have been sharing content for the last couple months. I confirmed that a partnership exists, but requests for additional information from either party were not fruitful.
Frankly, the most intriguing aspect of this partnership is already in plain view: The sites are posting the same articles. Take a look at this Gizmodo story [...]

A very quick lesson in search engine optimization: Brent Payne, the Tribune Co.’s head of SEO, whose wisdom I wrote about last week, posted a video yesterday demonstrating a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools. In the process, he offered a brief glance at The Chicago Tribune’s dashboard on the site, pictured above. What you’re [...]

Last month, I wrote about how The Associated Press plans to leverage its network of members and customers with centralized topic pages linked to content distributed by the consortium. That post has sprung at least three noteworthy legs:

an intelligent comments thread on Wikipedia’s strength in search results
some informed skepticism of automated pages from Reuters’ Felix [...]

One of the keys to success in the online news game is making sure people who might be interested in your content can find it. And the most common path for those seekers goes straight through the multihued logo of search giant Google.
Google’s genius is using algorithms to determine the value of content — what [...]

Yesterday we revealed plans by The Associated Press to hold back some content from member websites. (Great discussion going on there, by the way.) The primary motivation of that initiative is search: AP material that resides on hundreds of disparate sites at the same time will hardly rate in Google compared to a single page [...]

In a break with tradition, The Associated Press plans to prevent members and customers from publishing some AP content on their websites. Instead, those news organizations would link to the content on a central AP website — a move that could upend the consortium’s traditional notions of syndication.
That’s one revelation from a document we [...]

The New York Sun, which shuttered in September, appears to be making some sort of comeback online.
Amanda Gordon, the erstwhile newspaper’s society columnist, has been blogging on nysun.com since April 10, when she wrote, “I will be resuming Out & About for The New York Sun.” And yesterday the site posted an unsigned editorial [...]

— Mark Briggs asks: What’s your video SEO strategy? (That is, how are making sure Google and other search engines are sending traffic to your videos?) He points to this study by a consulting company on the issue.
Google can’t (yet!) understand all the words spoken in your videos, so even if your subject screams [...]