Journalism first and SEO next:  that’s the strategy that really pays. We had the Daily Mirror’s associate editor Matt Kelly say at the WAN India 2009 meet exactly how this approach - a change from a SEO dominated approach - had started paying a rich dividend for the Mirror’s websites.

Well interestingly Mr Kelly’s speech came just a few days after the BBC decided to go for a dual headlines  option - "a short one which appears on the front page and our other website indexes, and a longer one which will appear on the story page itself and in search engine results."

The SEO angle to this decision is obvious if one reads the headline examples provided in the BBC blog post which explained what it was all about. Even otherwise, it’s clear that BBC has been quite SEO savvy, if not SEO driven, in the way it structures content on its websites.

But then this is what Mr Kelly had to say, "We’ve listened to our fair share of SEO experts at Mirror Group, but when we relaunched Mirror.co.uk about eighteen months ago, we fought very hard to put SEO to one side and focus instead on trying to reinject some of the brand values that had served the newspaper so well for more than one hundred years. Some of that bold tabloid panache, the dynamism, the straight-talking, entertaining view of the world so familiar to readers of the Daily Mirror newspaper. And the relaunch was a great success."

(The full text of his speech can be found on a Guardian blog: Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly: put SEO in its place)

Its not uncommon for news sites to go for SEO in a big way these days to push traffic to the site. But traffic isn’t everything, he says. "As any first-year economics student will tell you, massively oversupplying a finite market generally leads to a collapse in value. Great swathes of newspaper website inventory - sometimes as much as 90 percent of page views - went unsold. "

He referred to casual online users as ‘locusts’. "They find our content in a search engine, they devour it, then they move back to Google, or wherever, and go looking for more. Often, they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts."

Locusts? Sure, he is not alone in saying so. In an article in The Australian that discussed advertisement revenue models and traffic surges some days ago, author Tim Burrows said,  "Another key indicator is how long readers stick around once they land. In this case, the locusts descended, devoured the story and moved right along. Very few stayed for a second page. So the long-term benefit of our sudden traffic surge was modest."