Abstract:

The Internet has become the primary source of information for many people. These people, who are online for different purposes every hour of the day, cause traffic by consuming data on various networks. Search engines manage 93% of this huge internet traffic. Google provides guidelines for publishers who want to be more visible in the search universe while managing this traffic. Despite these guidelines, many parts of the algorithm are kept secret. In the sectoral context, this is a necessity, as otherwise, it leads to great confusion in the search universe. The current ambiguity seems like a big discovery for publishers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals. Considering that a keyword sometimes generates millions of dollars in volume in the Google universe, the reward for the mentioned discovery is quite large in economic terms for these explorers. SEO is defined as the efforts of online publishers to make their content stand out in search engines. Even though this effort has changed the way online content producers produce news and their workflow, it has resulted in the creation of new business areas such as SEO editorial. The total traffic of internet news sites reveals that the traffic gained with the effect of SEO is quite high. Online publishers whose sole income is advertising need a certain amount of traffic to stay afloat. Google traffic remains an important economic resource for online publishers, given that most of the traffic on news sites comes from searches. In this study, the effects of SEO practices in Google on internet journalism were examined based on a review of the literature. The study is limited to internet news sites broadcasting in Turkey. Based on the findings in the literature, the most visited news sites broadcasting in Turkey were examined, and the effects of SEO on news content were tried to be analyzed. In the last part of the study, the changing SEO factors were analyzed and their possible effects on internet journalism were listed.

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