INVESTIGATING SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION FACTORS IN MEDIA WEBSITES The case of Greece

Rapidly evolving digital technologies across the last two decades have undeniably caused great changes in the field of journalism. The development of online journalism has affected the processes of journalistic work, creating at the same time new techniques and practices. On the internet, search engines still drive a great amount of traffic to news websites. For that reason, factors such as visibility and high ranking on search engines' results pages remain crucially important for media organizations. Nowadays, journalists or Web editors should be able to write and create appropriate content for the Web. This paper discusses in detail the impact of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on digital journalism. Through a quantitative analysis, a survey concerning Greek media websites is presented. The aim was twofold: on the one hand, to find out to what extent the use of SEO affects the traffic of a media website whilst, on the other hand, to discover to what degree media professionals in Greece utilize the possibilities given through search engines in order to increase traffic. Finally, a number of SEO elements and practices often used in news content are noted.