• Telegraph Blogs, Friday, July 18, 2008 2:45 PM

Shane Richmond, communities editor at Telegraph.co.uk, responds to a recent article (by satirical pub Private Eye) claiming that the Telegraph was forcing its reporters to write stories based strictly on keyword popularity. The piece also said that writers were instructed to cram as many keywords as possible into each article's first paragraph.

"Normally I'd chuckle and move on but the Private Eye item seems to have caused a little confusion, which I want to dispel," Richmond says. He argued that having reporters use keywords--choosing "Fallujah" instead of "a city west of Baghdad," for example--was key to helping readers find stories correctly.

"So yes, of course, that's what we do and our staff are regularly updated on the performance of our stories in search engines and told when a vital key word is missing," he said. But Richmond maintained that there were no keyword frequency mandates, nor did the Telegraph use search term popularity to dictate which topics the writers covered.

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