of democracy and free speech. This is, of course, bollocks. Journalists have always 'optimised' their texts for maximum exposure, from eye-catching headlines to sexy photos, from suggestive phrasings to full-out fabrications (which are easily weaselled out of by phrasing it as a question -- "Did Barry Adams beat up the Pope?"). SEO is just a slightly different breed of optimisation than journalists are used to. Instead of following the best practices for optimisation in print (or as it is known in some newspaper circles: "tits, cancer, and Lady Di") now journalists have to keep an eye on trending keywords and hot topics on social media sites. Does It Work? So what does this sort of SEO for journalism yield? Well I'm fortunate enough to work with an editor that's not afraid to experiment a little. A few months ago we used one of my own columns as a live exercise to see if we could get it to rank consistently in Google News for a variety of keywords simultaneously. Yes, I know, not very subtle. But as a test case it was brilliantly illuminating. After every headline change -- and subsequently a URL change on the website -- the article was re-indexed and published on Google News as an entirely new article. Additionally the article ranked in regular web SERPs as part of Universal Search results for a variety of keywords. This was not a short-lived effect. After the initial one-day burst you can expect from the highly volatile Google