SEO techniques for people who don’t have access to commercial keyword tools – how to research keywords using free SEO tools, and place selected keywords in a way that facilitates search engine indexing and ranking.
These search engine optimisation (SEO) tips are what I have compiled for use in digital journalism training; readers of this blog may use them as SEO guide for everyday search optimization work or as basis for a journalism course assignment. Continue reading
A survey of social media manager job descriptions shows some common desired skills that are aligned with journalism or communication training. It suggests that by incorporating some new skills, a journalism or communication program is poised to prepare students for this new area of job growth. Continue reading
Journalism students at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) want to share their experience organizing a successful Twitter chat – How to choose topic, design questions, invite panelists, promote the event, moderate the chat, what worked and what didn’t.
This post is contributed by Alex Corey, an undergraduate journalism student at CSUN who was charged with organizing a Twitter chat on “digital tools and branding.” The chat was held on Nov. 27, 2013 and organized by Latino Journalists Club at CSUN. Continue reading
Journalism students should be able to (a) write their own HTML/CSS codes, (b) tweak existing javascript codes and (c) talk about programming languages such as Python and Ruby. Continue reading
A capstone project for digital journalism majors can take the form of a multiplatform investigative story, coupled with a content strategy which involves using digital tools for topic research, data collection and content promotion.
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Writing for the Web is a free, four-week massive open online course (MOOC) offered by this blog. This free journalism course focuses on optimizing web texts for (a) easy online reading and (b) higher search engine ranking.
Update: This course concluded with 726 participants from 230 countries and regions Continue reading
As future content producers or managers, journalism students should learn to analyze relevant Google Analytics reports of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as bounce rate, average time on site, pageviews per visit, new vs returning visitors, and recency.
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Google Spreadsheets provides a free, one-stop solution for journalists and researchers to retrieve tabular data from a web page, visualize the data, and embed the visualizations in a news or research report. Continue reading
Web scraping, which is the collection and cleaning of online data, is the first step in any data-driven project. Here’s a short video that explains what scraping is, and how to create automated scraping jobs using a digital tool. Continue reading
