What a nice surprise to see on the front page of the Los Angeles Times today a story that features how important SEO is to web sites.

It’s Web 101 for this experienced intern covers how a former magazine editor, Lois Draegin, has entered a new life of online editing after losing her job with TV Guide. She now works as an unpaid intern for women’s site wow0wow.

As part of her new job, she’s discovered that how people search — and maintaining a search friendly web site — is an essential part of the content process. From the opening of the story:

In a search for a new job in the media, she had suddenly found herself techno-challenged. She didn’t know a URL from SEO. It wasn’t until she was teamed up with Randi Bernfeld at WOW that she understood the obsession with terms such as search engine optimization (a method to increase traffic to a website) or used Google Trends to pick story topics and write a uniform resource locater (Web address).

And further in: