AP Style Guide vs. SEO

In my day job I work in search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of tailoring a website to rank highly in search results. Like many businesses, newspapers depend largely on this "free" traffic to drive page views, and thus revenue. It is estimated that the New York Times receives about 12% of its traffic from search. The L.A. Times, much revered for being on the forefront of digital technology, earns nearly 20% of its traffic from search.

Sort of ironically I was Googling for AP Style Guide tips and came across this article that stated it's better more important for student journalists to learn SEO than AP Style. Even though I work in SEO, I think this statement is overblown and written in a baiting way to attract attention, and thus traffic. The writer appears to believe his incedinary statement by defending himself vigorously in the comments section - but perhaps showing the lack of depth in his argument, he does not do a very professional job. In the end, however, I do think the article brings up an interesting point that perhaps AP Style guide may need to evolve and accomodate how users may search for an article. At the very least, his suggestion for an SEO Style guide seems like something that would sell very well in newsrooms. Although if all newspapers followed the same style guide, the larger websites would usually win out when it came to ranking highly in search results.